17^th May 2011

We’ve arrived! On Sunday morning our ship pulled in to Newcastle habour and we were driving on English soil. As mandated by English law, the weather was firmly grey and drizzling with occasional patches of rain. The warm welcome that we received from Billie and Chris more than compensated for the chilly weather. It took us most of the afternoon of just looking at each other to take in that it was really over and we really are here.

We raced through our last three African countries and didn’t stop at all in Europe except for a quick swoop through my ancestral homeland in Holland and a little bit of essential downtime in Amsterdam. So this blog is our second last one. This edition will cover Sudan and Egypt, and then the final post will be the last leg through Europe and arrival home.

SUDAN

Sudan is a pretty weird place, made even more weird by the contrast it presents to it’s neighbour Ethiopia. Let me tell you about our first day in Sudan because that will pretty much give you the pattern for every encounter with a Sudanese that came after that.

We arrived in Gedaref town, 400km from the border quite late – by 8pm it was completely dark but still very busy, the little streets clogged with trucks and tuk tuks and men in Jallibyas. The signs they have are mostly in Arabic, so looking for a hotel by ourselves is totally hopeless. After some frustrating laps of the dark twisty streets we pull up at a petrol station. Here’s where it starts to get strange. First, Paul and the manager have a good long chat about what Paul has been up to, how our day as been and how we are keeping. On discovering our problem the manager decides what he needs to do to solve it. He immediately dispatches one of his members of staff who comes with us in the car to guide us to the hotel, and then provide a translation service to secure us a room and make sure that we have everything we need. When we try to insist on paying for a tuk-tuk to take the loaned staff member back across town to his work he absolutely refuses to accept any token of appreciation for his hospitality. A little later we are trying to negotiate for a security guard to watch Nandi (who has to be parked on the street) during the night, and another man comes and starts talking to us. He helps us with all the negotiations very fairly and chats to us for a while, and then insists on buying us tea. Everywhere we go from here on we hear the refrain “this is my country, you are my guest”. People want to bring us home, buy us food, buy us tea and look after us, asking nothing in return, indeed, insisting that we do not give them anything in return. It is a complete upside down world from Ethiopia, where we were afraid to even ask directions because any person we asked would demand the fee for guiding us to where we wanted to go.

This outstanding upside to Sudan is what everyone talks about and remembers, and certainly that is the main impression that we will take away with us. But North Sudan does have some downsides, and they aren’t trivial. It was easy to see why North Sudan sees so little tourism apart from very high end package tours of antiquities, where every aspect of dealing with the police and beaurocracy is done for you. Independent travellers are regarded suspiciously and in some situations, depending on the mood of the official, harassed. The police state is paranoid and vast; plain clothes police are everywhere, forcing us to submit to a continual stream of demands to see our passport and go through an onerous process of “registration” at every town we want to sleep in. Even though we had all the correct paperwork, tourist visas and the additional “alien registration” in place, we were continually pulled off the road and required to explain ourselves over and over again. One official told us that we did not have the right permits to travel and had to leave the country immediately. And then others (always straight after lunch, during siesta) completely ignored us.

　

26^th – 28^th March Blue Nile Sailing club, Khartoum

First thing on the agenda is jumping through a few more bureaucratic hurdles. Not content with getting US$50 each for visas, foreigners are also expected to register at the difficult to locate “Alien Registration office” in Khartoum. Having registered as aliens, and given up on trying to get a photography permit (another piece of paper you are supposed to get to take any photos at all) we return to the Blue Nile sailing club where our Sudanese friends take us out on their power boats (and let me drive it) and then (on dry land) show us a good time with a very small quantity of illegal and poisonous Araki. Araki is the white lightning that people who want to drink resort to under Sharia law. The man plying us with the stuff says that every so often he goes for a two week detox to Ethiopia, which means that for two weeks he gives his liver a break by only drinking beer.

The next day it is a typical Sudanese spring day – a balmy 40 something degrees that the locals don’t mind, but which is crushingly hot for us. They know they can’t afford to complain yet; in the summer temperatures will go over 50 degrees.

It emerges on inspection that we have quite a lot less US$ than we expected, our water jerry cans are all nearly empty, simultaneous with the campsite suddenly running out of water. And thanks to our night out, we both know that we have been struck dead on by white lightning. 40 degree temperatures probably aren‘t worse for nursing a hangover than say, industrial noise, but it does come pretty close. And now we are under pressure as well. We have to choose – right now – to stay and try and organise someone to send us some more cash by western union and to wait for the water to come back on, or leave today, and try and make the ferry that leaves from the north in two weeks. We elect to leave, a risky strategy but we think better than waiting in Khartoum running our resources down and waiting for money that might not arrive.

30 March – Wild camping in the desert between Atbara and Karima

We arrived at the little Meroe pyramids just on sunset; a kind of village of cottage sized pyramids in a little cluster on a dune. We camped just behind them and spend a restless night listening to the wind fighting relentlessly with the rain cover on the tent. It’s far too fiddly to contemplate removing it in the dark, but the sound is so maddening it makes us want to rip the thing right off. It’s a bit like laying in the tray of a ute going at 100km/h with a tarp loosely secured and snapping overhead.

In the morning I wisely follow one of my golden rules of Africa to always take the opportunities to pee (those rare moments when there are no people about) when they arise. And barely have I pulled myself back together when the first person appears; a boy with a camel, who settles himself about ten metres from the tent to wait patiently for us to be ready for a camel ride around the pyramids. A few minutes pass and he is joined by another boy, this one on a donkey selling jewellery, and then yet another selling baskets. They wait and watch us eat breakfast quite politely, not calling out to us or hassling, just waiting. I feed the camel some banana peels and celery tops (the donkey rejects both the offer of banana peel and the celery tops) and politely inspect all their wares before we leave, but don’t buy any as they are almost entirely made out of bones and leather and because, polite as they were, it is a bit intrusive for people to come and camp with you in the hope of making a sale, and I don’t really want to encourage them to do this.

After an hour or so slogging through the soft sand that surrounds the tiny pyramids and inspecting the insides carved with traditional Egyptian figures our top priority is finding water. Dinner last night was beans out of a tin and bread – an uncommonly frugal camping dinner that was made necessary by not having water to spare for anything but drinking. I don’t like to eat those kinds of camping meals except in an emergency, and in all our time in Africa this is actually the very first time we have had to resort to such extremes. A short distance from the pyramids is a rest stop for long haul buses. We meet the friendly manager and end up having coffee, and then a lunch of beautiful bread and bean stew, and then tea, before he shows us where we can fill our jerry cans. The place he shows us is a bank of taps in front of the mosque where people go to wash their faces, hands and feet before praying. We need eighty litres of water and have to stop every time a bus comes in full of people who want to say their prayers, so it takes quite a good long time to fill up the cans.

For the first couple of days Paul has trouble getting used to the huge quantities of water he has to drink to avoid dehydration. We are finding that we have to get through 4L of plain water (tea and soft drinks definitely don’t count!) each to replace what the heat and the aridity are sucking out of us, and keep our body functions normal. Australians are a bit like camels, we just drink until we aren’t thirsty even if it seems like an awful lot. Paul seemed to get to the end of his second litre of water and go “well, that must be enough, surely.”

31 March – Al Nasser Hotel, Karima

Dehydration and a mild throat infection caused by all the dryness and dust have made Paul a bit ill. We want to stay in a hotel and have a shower and rest, but it takes us over two and a half hours to complete all the nonsense that “registration” requires whenever foreigners want to stay in a town; locating the security office, finding a place to do photocopies and so on. By the time we finally complete all this, and are laying down in our hotel room Paul is running a fever and feeling pretty bad. Malaria is, of course, the constant worry, so we decide to check in at the clinic before dinner. Even though we speak almost no Arabic, it is a very simple and free process because people there are so enthusiastic to see foreigners and determined to be friendly and help.

For a country with almost no visible women – women are totally absent from public life – from the streets, from cafés, everywhere – it is a surprise that all the doctors are women and they speak enough English to understand Paul’s complaint. A finger prick and a slide under the microscope rules out malaria, so we are sent away with some antibiotics and a tangible sensation of relief.

1^st April – 4^th April Wild Camping along the road between Wawa and Wadi Halfa

Four windy transit days, eight hours driving a day, nightly camping in the desert brings us to the border crossing at Wadi Halfa. It is all the things that desert camping promises: wide open spaces, starry vistas, the sensation that we have the whole world to ourselves. It’s beautiful to strip off in the desert and have a warm wash out of one of the cooking pots at the end of a hot day, and then make a little fire in a pit, cook dinner, roast some vegetables, and relax in the cool of evening drinking tea. Considering how dry and inhospitable the desert is by day, it is a surprise when suddenly it all springs to life in the cool of night. In the mornings jackal prints cover our campsite where they have been looking for meat scraps (sorry, jackals) and there are also the trails of birds, rodents and snakes. In bed one night something starts beating on the walls of the tent. For a few confused moments we can’t think what it could possibly be, beating away like a little hand. Placing my hand over the moving spot I can feel a tiny little warm body scrabbling along the side. It is a bat, hunting bugs attracted by the light in our tent.

Desert camping is difficult as well as picturesque. How the Sudanese people survive without sunglasses I can’t imagine. From the time I wake up until the sun sets they are permanently fixed to my face. The omnipresence of dust also cannot really be overstated. We wake up some mornings and the mountains that said goodnight to us the previous day are have disappeared behind a pale wall of airborne dust (most of which seems to end up inside the car by the end of the day.) As we approach Wadi Halfa the problem of bugs also seems to get progressively worse. At sunset, tiny flies seeking fluids try to crawl into our eyes, nose and ears looking for a cool place and a drink. I can hardly blame them, but it’s not very pleasant.

The ferry from Wadi Halfa, Sudan to Aswan, Egypt is the only way for overland travellers to cross from Sudan into Egypt; there is a road but we’re not allowed to use it. The ferry only goes once a week, so people that we have been meeting at various points along the way all catch up to us here. All the foreigners on the boat save two, we have met a few times before. We are fortunate to be travelling north on the boat rather than south. An English family coming from Egypt to Sudan reported passing “the worst night of their lives” on the ship severely overloaded with Libyan refugees. Sudanese workers from Libya are fleeing the war by the thousands, and in typical African fashion, the question for the ferry was not “what is our capacity” or “how many life boats do we have” but rather “how many people want to go?” and “how many people can pay?”

Fortunately for us the boat going North is carrying only a modest 150 passengers, rather than the 600 that were on when the English family crossed, or the 2000 that were reportedly crammed into the boat the week before. A couple of amazing overlanders who are both hovering around 70 year age mark have caught the ferry before and tell us that the cabins are hot and foetid, and best avoided. They plan to sleep in the open, on deck, and so we decide to do the same. Our “fixer” Magdi, who is helping us with all the Arabic paperwork needed to move the car from Sudan to Egypt also helps us get VIP treatment, getting us on board the boat first. We get the prime deck location with shade for the afternoon and the following morning, and we set up camp there.

At sunset a muezzin call is played through the boat’s loudspeaker and the deck fills with men coming to pray. There is something very beautiful about the religious practice of singing in the entrance and exit of the sun each day. Behind them the last light of the sun still warms the surface of the Nile, and a slim crescent moon has a gentle glow. A little while later we take a meal below deck – an uninspiring spread of potatoes and macaroni, spinach soup and bread – and then spread out our sleeping bags and blanket to prepare for a chilly night laid out on the metal deck. The stars are brilliant and the water is perfectly smooth, the night peaceful and calm. Wrapped up in a ski parka and sleeping bag and blankets I actually sleep very well.

EGYPT

Customs in Egypt is the typical rugby match for travellers that is encountered anywhere that Africans are a) required to queue and b) required to share a common exit/entrance. The entrances and exits are one and quickly are totally blocked by people pushing ruck-style on both sides. This happens over and over, just like in real rugby but without a referee to intervene when someone is brought down. It’s fairly disagreeable, and there is a lot of shouting, and pushing and being pushed, but it’s totally impossible for us to feel sorry for ourselves for very long when confronted with the scene at the port of Aswan. At first, it seems like we have accidentally come into some kind of clothing market. Every square inch of fence space is covered with shirts and pants, women’s clothes, children’s clothes, all colours and sizes. As we progress to the exit all the owners of these clothes appear; it is a virtual refugee camp, hundreds and hundreds of women and children are sitting on blankets, each with a little barrel of water and some suitcases, waiting for the ferry to Sudan. They are living here, and sleeping here, waiting to leave chaos for uncertainty.

We spend a few days in Aswan enjoying Egypt’s quasi European feel, which is worlds away from the distinctly developing flavour of Sudan. Our hotel has hot water and a view over the Nile, and is nicely situated close to a (real) 5 star hotel that does a truly five star buffet where we can gorge ourselves on broccoli soup and roasted beetroot salad, extra-virgin olive oil and brown bread. Ahh, the west. It’s reassuring that now we are always getting closer and closer to the west.

On Friday the 8^th we are also reassured by a demonstration of what the democracy protests look like for real. A little while after the Friday prayers have concluded a procession of around a thousand people, women, children and men, makes its way down and then back up the main street. They are cheerful and friendly, it is a party atmosphere. There is no anger in their demands, they don’t damage anything or even drop any rubbish. They wave to us, at our hotel window and give us tourists the thumbs up.

14^th April – the House of Life, Abydos

In the morning we set out early for the Valley of the Kings, a must – see and quintessential tourist trap. On the whole I haven’t enjoyed any of the famous Egyptian sites as much as I could have, because I feel that they are so greedily and cynically run. The Valley of the Kings doesn’t allow any photos – not even of the valley itself, let alone the tombs, which you have paid hundreds of (Egyptian) pounds to go and see. On the day we went more than half of the tombs (and all the ones known to be spectacular) were closed, but the ticket price stays the same. The same, unless you want to see the famous tomb of Tutankhamun (the only Valley of the Kings tomb that still has a mummy in situ) for which you have to buy a separate ticket, which instantly doubles your entry cost. There are endless little niggles; having to pay for toilets, the huge price for a cup of tea (ten times what it is outside), the gauntlet of desperate sellers they make you run, with vendors literally chasing you in and out of the gates, all of which take little bites out of the potential for enjoyment.

But all the hassle and money-hoovering aside, the tombs are incredible. The Valley of the Kings is a niche that wriggles up into a rocky hillside. From a blinding, sweltering sunlit day you descend instantly into a cool and starry twilight that feels wonderfully eternal, completely still. The sun never passes across these chambers, and time never moves. Each rectangular passageway slopes downward into the rock walls. The sides are covered with meticulous lines of flawless hieroglyphics, strange alien-like figures, and strips of pictures representing the vast pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods. I notice a blue god (who is like Shiva) and a sacred white bull (like Nandi) as well as a rainbow of imaginative animal life, from sacred slugs to fire breathing hares, winged snakes and men with dog’s heads.

The tombs, though are completely empty. Only Tutankhamen’s tomb still contains one coffin and one mummy; all the other tombs have been almost completely emptied, first by Egyptian robbers, then by foreign treasure hunters, and finally by the Egyptian authorities themselves. Government officials looted and sold a lot of what remained, with only scraps, and the late discovery of Tutankhamen being preserved in the Egyptian museum.

15^th April – The House of Life, Abydos

Abydos stands in stark contrast to the archaeological curiosities that the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings has become. Abydos is my favourite place in Egypt, and it is only by chance that we went there. A woman we met in Kigali crossed paths with us again in Uganda and Ethiopia and gave me a book that she loved called “the search for Omm Sety.” I have to say that at first I was under whelmed; it was too strange and unliterary, but when some strangeness of the tale had worn off, the heart of the story stayed with me and became more resonant. Omm Sety, (originally known as Dorothy Eades) was an uneducated English woman who became a respected Egyptian scholar, based on het meticulous field work and her peculiar claim to having had an experience of ancient Egyptian life at first hand. Omm Sety had a very clear recollection of her past life as an Egyptian temple virgin more than 3000 years ago, and seemed able to bring first hand knowledge to the study of ancient Egyptian artefacts and practices. As a child, three thousand years ago, Omm Sety had been dedicated to the temple at Abydos and she worked and worshipped there. Then, in the 1950s, as an elderly expatriate Englishwoman, she returned to Abydos to revitalise its ancient religious life. She began to use the temple as a temple again – taking off her shoes when she entered, making offerings and libations to the ancient gods, performing the prescribed rituals and ceremonies on the sacred days. I was moved by the story, and very excited to find that in her wake a group of people have continued to nurture the seed that she planted. On arriving in Abydos (with a mandatory police escort) we found the House of Life, a foundation that aims to reconnect people with gods that predate Jesus and Mohammed by at least 2000 years.

In the mornings, residents at the House of Life go to the temple in ordinary clothes, walking around it in bare feet, honouring each room. They often sit, or lay on a mat to meditate when the rooms are quiet. In the afternoons they go as a group, dressed completely in white, to sing and pray and open themselves to the energies of the ancients.

Abydos was one of the most sacred sites of ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians believed that the head of Osiris, the most important God in ancient Egypt, is buried beneath this temple, and as such Abydos was the most auspicious place for mortals to be buried, for those wishing to conquer death and be resurrected to eternal life as Osiris was. As a child at school Omm Sety was banished from scripture class for accusing the followers of Christianity of being pretenders – foolish dupes worshipping a god that was a mere copy of something far more ancient. In her opinion, the story of a god who died, and was resurrected and promised life after death had been told long before Jesus Christ and the New Testament.

It is a completely different experience to go to a temple that is being used as a place of worship, than it is to visit a temple that has become a hollow tourist attraction. I took off my shoes at the entry, just as I did at the rock-hewn churches in Lalibella, and in the mosques in Istanbul, and allowed myself the air of contemplation and wonder that comes to the places frequented by those who seek.

At noon we were sitting silently in one of the cool stone rooms. In the rooms next to us residents from the House of Life lay silently meditating. The call to prayer played from two different mosques but at the same time created a strange acoustic effect like resonant hum. It was extremely beautiful, the melancholy singing magnified into something much more than a human voice in the ancient worship house. I’d like to take it as a hopeful sign, for tolerance in Egypt and the ability of Islam to co exist with other religions.

The Egyptian guards, presumably most of them being Muslim, do seem to find this enthusiasm for their ancient gods strange and perplexing. It seems clear that they don’t really know what to do with people who want to use the temple as a temple, and not just a tourist site.

Sunday 17^th April – Salma campsite Cairo

We are driving to Cairo when the thing I expected to see a long, long time ago in all this crazy driving finally presents itself; a really bad car crash. I hear Paul exclaim “Oh my gosh” and turn my head to see a long spray of sand as the car hits the median strip, and the unbelted passenger flying sideways through the air.

We pull Nandi over and reverse up the hard shoulder until we are parallel with the accident. Expecting the man who went through the windscreen to be mincemeat, and probably dead, and not fancying giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to mince meat, I find that I need a moment to get the courage to look at him. I go first to the second passenger who has a minor head wound, provide a dressing and a bandage to cover that and stop the bleeding. Suddenly, the crowd around the other man totally disperses, as if on cue. I go over to him, and the more I examine him the less I can believe what I see. There is almost no blood on him. He is conscious and moaning, not gurgling blood, or even loosing colour to his fingernails or lips. I take his hand and start talk to him, marvelling ar his incredible good fortune and the toughness of the human body. I talk to him with very simple arabic until the ambulance arrives, asking him his name and telling him mine, and telling him that he will be OK, to make sure that he keeps a clear airway. The ambulance does arrive – thank goodness for biannual refreshers in first aid.

19^th April – Giza, the Sphinx and Pyramids.

What can I say about the Pyramids? We have ticked off a significant box in the list of things one is supposed to do before one dies. These strange old structures create enhance our sense of insignificance in the passage of time, simultaneous with a suggestion of permanence. The pyramids made me feel at once huge and tiny: huge, because I was witnessing an object and a spectacle that has been occurring with very little change for over 4000 years. And tiny because my life, and the lives of all my ancestors are but a glimmer across the face of this immense monument.

The highlight of the pyramids for me was the opportunity to go inside. For an additional 100 Egyptian pounds ( a little less than $20) you can crawl along a central tunnel right into the heart of the pyramid. When we arrived there a group of people (who were nothing to do with the House of Life) were occupying this heart, and chanting. Holding hands, completely dressed in white, they filled the chamber with a haunting, resonant “Om.” After they left and we were alone for a moment I filled it with my own “Om” the chamber picking the sound up and enriching it beautifully.

A little later in the afternoon Paul was interviewed by a filmmaker about his impressions of Egypt and his thoughts on the revolution. I thought he did very well, and evidently the filmmaker did too, as he troubled to get quite a few different cuts of Paul saying the same things to make sure that he would have some usable material. The documentary might come out on you tube – if it does we will be sure to post a link to it here.

　

　

On the first of February this year we finally escaped Jungle Junction and started on the second half of Africa. It had taken us sixteen months to get from Cape Town to Nairobi, and it was time to get a wriggle on. So wriggle we have. By travelling constantly we have covered the top half of Africa in just three months instead of over a year.

We last checked in with you from Wim’s Holland house in Addis Ababa, and since then we have come a very long way. We completed a huge loop of the north of Ethiopia, taking in it’s most celebrated tourist sites of the rock hewn churches of Lalibella, the stelae of Axum and the city of Gondor. From Gondor we crossed into Sudan, and followed the Nile on it’s journey to the Mediterranean. At the Sudan – Egypt border we put Nandi on a ferry and said goodbye for the sail into Egypt. Once reunited we continued to stay with the magnificent river all the way to Cairo where we are now taking a long, wistful breath before leaving Africa behind.

It’s been very exciting to be in North Africa at a time of such tremendous change, and looking at the governments of the countries we are passing through and wondering who’s next and when. Thinking back over the countries that are most touristed, the ones that are most stable and most visited, there is still scarcely any democracy at all. Stable, stagnant dictatorships are the hallmark of east Africa, in contrast to west Africa whose states are in a perpetual turbulence of power struggles and war.

Namibia and Botswana have had the same people governing them for decades. Zimbabwe is famous for it’s lack of democracy, but Malawi’s leader has also been in power for almost thirty years. Uganda and Rwanda have similar problems with small, stagnant power pools, having had the same presidents and party faithful in power for fifteen years or more.

And our last three countries, Ethiopia, Sudan and until very recently Egypt have all had the same person in charge for the unbelievably long time of close to three decades a each. Sudan’s president is also subject to an arrest warrant from the international criminal court for war crimes; the targeting of civilians and mass killings of Southern Sudanese.

Seeing how positively Egypt has carried out the first part of it’s revolution (I say the first part because at present the danger of the people getting stuck with a military dictatorship seems close) and how hated by the people the governments of Ethiopia and Sudan are made me excited to see revolution catch on there, while at the same time being afraid of what it could mean for us.

As we were preparing to leave Addis Ababa a newspaper was reporting that Ethiopians in America were protesting there, begging America to provide military support to the Ethiopian democracy movement. Wim said that he felt something was in the air, and advised us to keep our fuel and water tanks full, ready to flee at the first signs of trouble. When we woke up on the morning of Wednesday the second of March it was to the sound of heavy artillery fire. My mind began to race – how quickly would we be able to pack up and leave? Did we have enough fuel? After a few heart pounding moments the sleep fog left me, and I remembered that this was a public holiday, a celebration of the Ethiopian’s victory against the Italians, but it made me realise how close revolution really could be.

And today we are in Egypt, it is Friday, the day set aside first to prayer, and then to protest. We are staying indoors, just to be safe, catching up on the blog and watching the news. Travelling so far so quickly means that a lot has happened – I am trying to keep a balance in this blog of keeping you informed of all the big interesting stuff without going on too long – there is an awful lot to catch up on for the last three countries!

Friday, 11^th March Bet Abraham Hotel, Lalibella

I knew almost nothing about Ethiopia until we arrived there, just the usual news bites of fly covered children and blighted fields. I had no idea of the ancient treasures Ethiopia contains.

For the “wow” factor, Ethiopia’s rock hewn churches are way up there. More than a thousand years old, the churches of the world’s first Christians are huge buildings carved entirely out of one massive piece of stone. In Lalibella there are thirteen such churches and chapels ranging from buildings as high and impressive as a cathedral to dark, private enclaves hidden in the womb of the earth.

Bet Giorgis, the last church created here, has become the icon of Lalibella. A huge stone slab, at least as big as a football field rests in the mountain. Instead of building walls up, a vacant space around a cross shaped central building was dug down. Then, the insides of the building were excavated, four rooms, three for the laity and one area curtained off containing the “holy of holies.” Columns were beautifully reserved inside and decorative frescoes carved into the walls. In the solid walled areas around the church little rooms have been dug for monks to meditate and sleep in. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lalibella is not merely this architecture of dedication, patience and faith, but rather that the faith that built them still serves here. These churches are not mere curiosities or tourist attractions. Daily a white clad flock of believers come here to kiss the pillars and revere the saints.

It is quite an odd experience to enter a functioning Church during a service as a tourist rather than as a worshipper. I watch other tourists snap pictures of the devout as they pray and sing. We listen to tourist guides give ever louder lectures to compete with the voices of the faithful. The parishioners here ignore us and are utterly generous and patient, giving us a wordless greeting with a warm smile, a hand over their heart and bow to our presence. I felt very humbled by this warmth and wondered which church in England or Sydney could experience such an invasion and still be so graceful. I think if a Japanese tourist walked into a Sydney church and started snapping photos of the parishioners and the altar during the service they would be coldly ejected!

On our last day in Lalibella we sat in the Bet Giorgis in silence and meditated a little on the wonder of a building carved out of one piece of stone. I thought about the Christian faith, and how it can be that certain ideas can help us to pass through things that would other wise be just as impenetrable as stone, such as our fear of dying. I thought about how belief in reincarnation or an afterlife can help me to be free of the fear of death, so that I can live and enjoy my life to the full.

17^th March – Africa Hotel, Axum

The joke about going the wrong way round turns out not to be so funny any more. Ethiopia is no country for a tired traveller. The poverty grinds peculiarly on me; it’s just plain miserable to see people every day with leprosy and deformities caused by childhood polio, to watch children and women breaking themselves with impossible loads, and at the absolute bottom, beneath the poorest of the poor, the beaten and starving animals, horses and donkeys being neglected and worked to death by their suffering owners.

It is confronting being a privileged person travelling in a poor country, because of course I empathise with all of the people I see who are living very hard lives, but I don’t feel like I have much to offer them apart from bearing witness to their sufferings. People ask us for money all the time, and I continually go around a useless loop; should I give to people who beg money from me or not? Does it help that one person to buy something essential for medicine, or does it just further entrench a damaging attitude that begging from foreigners is a viable, and perhaps easier, way to live. To give or not to give; Africa’s eternal question.

Right or wrong, the reality is that white tourists are the face of western wealth and are the targets for wealth redistribution. I used to criticise people who went on package holidays and never left their fancy hotels to walk among the “ordinary” folk. But by the end of our stay in Ethiopia that is exactly what we are doing; sealing ourselves away from the constant stream of requests and begging and harassment in compounds and hotels and restaurants, avoiding walking around as much as we can. Axum should have been remarkable for it’s history and the ancient pre – Christian stelae, as well as the Queen of Sheba’s pool. But with people following us around trying to get money from us from the moment we leave the hotel until the moment we get back, mostly what we think about is how unhappy we are in Ethiopia.

19^th March – Saturday

My birthday started out looking like it was just going to be the icing on the I-Hate-Ethiopia Cake. We drove into the Simien Mountains national park, a tiny national park that has been completely eaten up by Ethiopia’s and Africa’s one true obsession and religion – the worship of the human – which is pursued to the exclusion of any other thing. Nothing, not clean water, not education, and certainly not trees or lions or monkeys is more important that being fruitful, multiplying, and filling every corner of the earth with farmland and cows and people.

I wanted to see one wild place in Ethiopia, but as we crossed into the national park I was sickened and saddened to see that it was just more of the same. People, farms, cows and no trees. We have to drive 60km in – practically to the centre of the park, to reach a tiny island of indigenous foliage. They were the only trees we saw that were not the alien species of Pine or Eucalyptus in the whole huge country of Ethiopia. And their indigenous foliage was so unique and so beautiful. In this little island there are strange palm trees that grow in the snow, and a special baboon that looks more like a tiny lion than a monkey. I got to have a snowball fight with Paul on my birthday, and later on a delicious vegan Ethiopian meal and to watch the full moon rise as well (the closest full moon to the earth in 18 years, from the car park while supervising Paul fixing a flat tyre), so it all turned out pretty well in the end.

21 – 24 March

Ethiopia has worn us out, and I have to admit that it is probably the only country that I have ever been to that on the whole, the things I disliked turned out to be more than the things I liked. That being said, there is plenty to like about Ethiopia and I am glad that we went and saw it. Top of the list is the Ethiopian cuisine – they actually have a cuisine, not a mere preparation of food that will stop you being hungry, and on top of that the cuisine includes vegetarians and has a varied and healthy menu for them.  Ethiopian people who aren’t tourist touts are beautiful – warm without being pushy, hospitable and gentle. The other huge thing to like about Ethiopia is that it did seem to us like tourist dollars are being used to benefit thier communities. We whinged about how much we had to pay to visit the churches in Lalibella, until the last day there when we saw that actually, virtually every kid was in a school uniform, and there were no kids at all begging from us. And then we said, well, we can’t believe it but maybe the funds here are being well spent.

Stay tuned: I will release the Sudan edition shortly, probably next week. I hope this entry wasn’t too whiney, but we just didn’t have a good time in Ethiopia.

　In which we visit a desert Oasis and the Jade sea, a remote Benedictine monastery, the enigmatic tribes people of the Omo valley and finally arrive in Addis Ababa.

A lot can happen in a month, but watching one middle eastern country go into revolution after another is surely something momentous that I will only see once in my life. At present we are watching 24/7 coverage of the protests in Libya, interspersed with clips of other middle eastern countries having democratic spasms; Egypt, Quatar, Bahrain, Jordan. Chucking out all these stagnant squatting dinosaurs is a positive move for the reigon. On a selfish note, if we can’t enter Egypt when we get there, it will mean a six-country detour to get around to Morocco and Spain instead. Fingers crossed for a peaceful transition for all our sakes.

And in the meantime, we are looking at Kenya and Ethiopia, with no mains water, even in the cities, and no sewage or rubbish collection, with class sizes of between 40 and 70 children per teacher, no universal primary education, millions of children going to work in the fields or breaking rocks and living on cents a day and think “surely you can’t be far behind, for chucking out your own parasitic parliaments.”

　

Our trip from Nairobi to Addis Ababa has taken us through some of the most remote, arid and poorest reigons of Africa. The North West corner of Lake Turkana and the Southern reigon of Ethiopia is home to a kaleidescope of tribal peoples, all of whom survive by subsitence agriculture or as nomadic herders. The do not own property; their wealth is in their animals, their status and the jewellery they wear.

It has taken us just under a month to drive from Nairobi to Addis Ababa following the Lake Turkana road. After finally securing all of our onward visas in Nairobi we were able to leave on the last day of January.

In the scheme of our whole trip we have spent almost three months waiting for things at Jungle Junction in Nairobi; wating for a new Carnet de Passage, waiting for new bank cards, waiting for the cause of electrical gremlins to be uncovered and hunting around for batteries, a stove and for oil. This last layover was by far the longest, but probably also the most welcome. After a year of being on the move I was certainly feeling like a rootless refugee, and was quite exhausted by the perpetual motion and the grind of Africa. There are little pockets in Africa where there are hot showers and electricity, and you don’t see women and donkeys carrying huge loads and being flogged every day. It is also an exhausting daily battle when children beg for food. Every encounter is agony. Give it to them and encourage the begging, or refuse to share what I have plenty of?

Monday 31 January – Embu Slopes Villa Hotel.

It feels great to be leaving Nairobi and setting off again onto the second part of the journey. The only problem is, over a year has gone and we are only just half way! Such big, difficult countries and long stretches without water or services ahead. It reminds me very much of leaving Cape Town; the fear of leaving “civilisation” and setting off into Africa. Fear of being without things, of trouble and the unknown. Every available space, as well as quite a few unavailable ones, is crammed full of all the good food that can be bought at Nakumatt. With strategic buying I am hoping that the vegetables in our little fridge can last for a week. Four hours driving takes us out of Nairobi and into the countryside where corn husks and banana peels litter the streets instead of plastic bags.

1^st February Castle Forest Lodge.

Castle Forest Lodge is somewhere we could bring our parents, and quite a few people working in Kenya have done exactly that. Only about an hour past Embu, Castle Forest lodge is set in the lush greenery of the slopes of mount Kenya. The water in the river is cool and potable, the cropped lawns and cosy firelit dining room delightfully English. And there is a freezing swimming pool, continually flowing with icy water from Mt Kenya and surrounded with elephant footprints. The four friendly dogs are kept in at night so that they don’t harass the elephants – and get squished by them.

2^nd February

We took a two hour guided walk in the forest, smelling the bush magnolias and natural camphor that grows here.

3rd February Range Lands Hotel, Isiolo.

Paul and I spend half an hour filling up every jerry can and bottle available. As the cold, abundant water flowed over my hands, spilling out of the cans and onto the lush grass, I thought about the long stretches of dusty road ahead of us, and wondered if our 90L capacity would be enough. When I wondered this aloud Paul said “there are people doing this route on motorbikes, and they aren’t carrying 90 litres of water.” He’s right. There are some people doing it on pushbikes, too. Range Lands hotel marks the start of a relentlessly dry stretch, all the way to Addis Ababa.

4^th February Yare Camel Camp, Maralal

By 4.30pm it had already been a long day. The horizon wriggling with dust swirling twisters, long acacia thorns perforating my flip flops. The last time we knew where we were was in the little village of Wamba, at midday. Now we are backtracking 40km to the biggest village we have passed, consisting of a small primary school and a couple of huts set on a hill. We are hoping we can stop there tonight. When we get there we meet a Samburu man, a teacher, who wants to go to the same big town we were aiming for, Maralal. He’s ready to go now and looking at the map we think that we are probably only an hour away.

At 7pm dark is falling, and the three of us are having a break, drinking juice and eating buiscuits by the side of the road, enjoying the early evening light and the peaceful quiet of the scrub. Out of the blue Paul asks the teacher, Phillip “Is it safe to drive this road at night?” “Oh, no” he says “It’s not safe at all. Lots of bandits. They rob cars, motorbikes, everyone.” The early evening takes on a sinister cast. An approaching motorbike is greeted with suspicion. I pack away the food things quickly, inwardly cursing our descision to press on for Maralal when we could be tucked up safely in Phillips’village. I ask him what he thinks we should do if we encounter bandits. He says that they have guns “but they never shoot” and if there are men standing in the road we should “pretend like you are going to slow down, but then speed off.”

The problem with this plan is that Maralal is at the top of a small mountain and going uphill Nandi couldn’t outrun a geriatric bandit using a walking frame.

We make Maralal without incident, about half past nine.

5^th February

We take a day off to recover from a long day’s driving.

6^th February

We had a lovely fire and it seemed a shame to waste the coals. I put a few beetroot, one potato and an onion in some foil into the fire before we went to bed. In the morning the parcel had been dragged out of the fire and torn open. One beetroot was tentatively nibbled. The potato was half gone. We were able to salvage the other three unsampled roasted beetroots for dinner (with lentils. Delicious.) as well as spot the likely culprit, an elegant and silent black weasel.

7^th February – Baragoi Guesthouse, Baragoi.

Driving to Baragoi we cross rivers and have our first encounter with what will become a familiar sight. Women and school children in uniform are digging holes in riverbeds to collect a cup of foamy, muddy water to drink. The children are on morning tea break, the women laboriously filling jerry in cans this way, which they will later carry kilometres in the heat to their homes.

Baragoi guesthouse; a fawlty towers experience. They offer to make us dinner…but do we have any ingredients? I give them cabbage and carrots and tomatoes for our meal. In the bar they have to send out for our warm beer. If we had wanted to drink the local gin mixed with water that would have been fine. Probably the local gin sterilises the water better than chlorine, but then again giardia parasites going on a drunken rampage in my gut probably isn’t worth the risk. Sober giardia wreak havoc enough.

In the morning the “manager” collects payments for dinner and car minding…and then the people who actually did these jobs come to us to demand payment.

8^th February New Directions guesthouse South Horr

We were lost again yesterday when we ended up stuck in Baragoi, trying to get to South Horr, so when we see a truck heading up what might be the right road we get excited. “Where are you going?” “South Horr.” Excellent. They consent to us following them. It probably still saves us time, since there are no sign posts and it is easy to go twenty, thirty, forty kilometres down the wrong road here, even though with two stops for circulating what appear to be equally knackered tyres around the truck’s wheels, 40km takes us over four hours. But we get there, and no precious fuel wasted. There is no petrol station between Maralal and Arba Minch, in Ethiopia.

New Directions is a Christian campsite that prohibits alcohol, tobacco, drugs and profanity. Nothing like a prohibitive sign to make you want to yell “Stop being such a stupid drunk bastard and pass that f*cking joint over here!” I don’t like campsites covered in DO NOT signs, because it makes me feel like a kid and I think DO NOT signs encourage people to behave badly.

If I ever open a Christian campsite the sign at the front will ask people to express gratitude, to take time to pray or meditate, to be respectful and to feel welcome.

9 February

We’re staying an extra day at New Directions because a lovely couple we met at Lake Nkuruba Community Campsite, Uganda have arrived. They are going the same way as us, they have a newer land cruiser than us and they have a GPS ( and a co-driver who knows how to use it. The essential accesory that we never quite acquired even when we had a GPS.) So they are the perfect people to go in convoy with across the next stretch. South Horr to Arba Mich in Ethiopia is probably the most remote section of the whole Africa trip. The Turkana route is famous for breaking cars or sinking them in sand and for bandits and pitiless tracks that peter out into nothing.

I had hoped that we would find someone to go in convoy with, and we literally could not have found anyone better. Urs and Luzia have been coming to Africa regularly since before they were married 30 years ago. Africa is their great love, they have crossed the Sahara several times, and work to support a dizzying array of projects here. The swiss couple really know how to travel in Africa and it is great for us to watch how they handle locals and beaurocracy.

10^th February

Western clothes have mostly dissappeared. Women and men wear beautiful diplays of beaded jewellery and loin clothes.When we stop materialise out of the scrub to beg for water in Swahilli “Maji, Maji!”

Herds of camels slope into the road, the curve of the earth is revealed on the treeless plains.

And then, over the crest of a hill is our first view of it; Lake Turkana. The Jade Sea. The brilliant blue expanse, too large to see the borders of it, glitters in the desert. The water is too brackish to drink. It has Africa’s highest concentration of crocodiles. And it is cold, deliciously cold for paddling.

In sight of the lake is Loyangalani, a truly exotic palm covered oasis in a pale expanse of sand. Most people are dressed traditionally, wearing ear stretchers and wide collars made of beads. Most of the town is comprised of round huts, like slightly deflated soccer balls resting on one flattened side. They are made from woven palm fronds. A part of the (not very good) film The Constant Gardener was reputedly filmed here.

The heat of the day is flattening so the offer of a swimming pool at one of the campsites seems very appealing… until we learn Loyangalani’s strange secret. Yes, the water from the underground spring is potable, the most important quality in a desert spring. But it is also a volcanic spring and the cool blue painted pool that the Hotel staff are are tantalisingly filling with water for us is boiling hot.

12 February – Wild Camping, Sibiloy National Park.

At Urs’ urging we are up at 5am, trying to beat the heat. Even at 5am there is no respite; I peel my sweaty body from the top of the nylon sleeping bag, wishing for the slightest breeze.

At lunch break we get it. We are relaxing and eating under Urs and Luzias awning when suddenly Urs shouts “Close your car! Go and close your car!” It’s smaller than a tornado, but would easily surround a house. A larger version of the dust twisters that are a constant feature of the landscape is swirling towards us. Urs’ awning begins to flap. I close the car up while Paul helps the Bohlens with their awning. In the end it is a false alarm, the twister contines a wide arc around us, but even the little ones make a right mess.

It’s a little bit of schadenfruede, but I am happy when, even with the GPS and it’s accomplished operator, we manage to get lost in Sibiloy National Park. We are meant to be following a short track around the outside, but we have managed to end up in the middle of the park about an hour before dark. It seems peaceful, and despite the incongruous fact of seeing about thirty armed rangers at the gate (a para military force, really) and knowing that the park contains no animals that could require such a force, (the park was formed to protect fossils, not live animals) we don’t think anything of wild camping in a riverbed in the centre of the park.

It’s delightful to take my pot of warm water and soap out into the bush, and wash under the stars without any lions to worry about.

It’s not until our next stop, Ileret, that we get the news that a man was killed here yesterday, in a tribal conflict that we find out always plays out in the national park. So that explains all those heavily armed rangers in trucks.

13^th February Father Florian’s Benedictine Mission, Ileret.

About 1pm we arrive in Ileret, a village given the feeling of space settlement on an inhospitable planet by the use of tin sheeting to line the traditional soccer ball huts. The huts are tiny and in the heat, the tin walls must be unbearable. Father Florian visits a sick person in one of these huts in the afternoon, which must be like going into hell.

Father Florian is one of Urs and Luzia’s innumerable contacts. Projects run by the Benedictines often receive funds from Urs and Luzia’s NGO, Faraja. In addition to being a Benedictine monk Father Florian is also royalty. His other title “His Royal Highness” is not used, despite the fact that he is a direct descendant of the last king of Bavaria. He is a friendly and welcoming man, and I would like to have had a few more days with him to try and understand the good he believes he is pursuing.

All through this area we have met Christian missionaries trying to convince the “resistant” (their word) Turkana and other tribal people to abandon their traditional practices and beliefs, to come to the light of Christianity and Capitalism, to property ownership and “decent” clothes, and I find this ideal backwards and despicable. But I am utterly fascinated by the people who have given up their own pursuit of weath and family and career because they think that homogenising the world is such a worthy goal.

　

Before coming to Africa I thought that slavery and the practice of Christian missionaries eradicating the cultures of the world ended last century, being frowned on by the enlighted world. But sadly, the Toureg and other Arabic people still keep slaves in the North of Africa, and Christian churches are still supporting the missionaries who are intentionally eradicating the richest seam of cultural diversity in the world, which exists here in the Omo valley and surrounds of Africa.

Curious to see it for ourselves, we accept the invitation to go to Sunday mass with Father Florian, at a smaller village about 12 km out of Ileret. After negotiating for a time with the old men who occupy the shade of the only tree, Father Florian and his assistant lay out a small altar from his breifcase and mass begins. Father Florian gives it in Swahili, reading from a Swahili bible, and a local man translates for him into the Dasenech language.

It’s wonderfully different from mass in a Church. None of the hushed, hallowed manners of Church apply; people talk, raising their voices ever louder to compete with Father Florians speech, taking advantage of having an assembly of so many people to hear them. They shout out conversations to people in the street who shout their answers back. A bird in the tree twitters and whistles throughout. A small number of elderly people, perhaps hedging their bets, accept communion at the end of the service.

In the evening, Father Florian has all four of us as guests to his Sunday dinner, along with two Brothers. The table is laid with cabbage, spaghetti, ugali, potatoes and nile perch, as well as a one litre glass bottle, formerly altar wine, now cold water, for each person. It seems like a ridiculous amount of water, but at the end of the meal all the bottles are empty.

14^th February Evangadi campsite, Turmi, Ethiopia.

Upon arriving in Turmi, Ethiopia, the stated goal destination of our convoy, it had been agreed that we would celebrate with a restaurant meal. Urs comes over to our camp to suggest an aperitif and says “I’m very sorry, I know that I promised Champagne, but it seems that a chilled white wine is all that I can offer. Is that OK?”

Luzia brought back from Switzerland all their unconsumed Christmas nibbles, so olives and sudried tomato pate and wine are laid out on a table under the moon to celebrate st Valentines’ day and our safe passage.

15 ^and 16th February

Rest days. We are obliterated by the heat and lay around most of the day. The camp’s two donkeys, used to carry water to the tanks, hover near the fridge when I make lunch, gratefully accepting discarded cabbage leaves, onion skin, tomatoes and crusts of bread.

17^th February Rocky’s campsite, Jinka

Jinka is the epicentre for tourism of the Omo valley tribes, and the sideshow element of photographing people the way one photographs lions on a game drive comes to a peak here. An area of hundreds of kilometres around it has been affected by tourism of the most famous tribe, the Mursi.

You might not recongnise the name, but you will remember the image of women wearing massive clay lip plates wedged into a split in their lower lip. On our approach to Jinka there are painted naked little boys on stilts, trying to get us to take their photo and pay for it. Children dance by the side of the road and then run after the car to demand money. Any time we stop anywhere, people, especially children, approach us to demand that we take their photo in exhchange for two birr. Or that we just give them two birr.

18 February

At eight am we are at the Tour Guide office, two white land cruisers in a vast 4×4 jam, all trying to get their carloads of tourists up to the villages as quickly as possible, so that they can bring them back, disgorge them and then collect an afternoon batch. A Mursi girl, her disfigured empty lip dangling from her mouth down her chin like a loop of rubber tries to sell me her lip plate. She thrusts it desperately in the window, insisting that I take it. At the gate to the national park we wait about half an hour for our permit to be cleared, and all the time herds of children prowl all of the stopped cars, testing the effectiveness of various demands “Give me pen! Give me T-Shirt! Give me one Birr! Give me…Water, book, banana, earring, plastic…..” Some children, six or seven years old are working at 9am selling huge bunches of bananas or bags of oranges, and they are still there, working in the sun when we leave the park in the afternoon.

More naked painted boys along the side of the road. When we don’t take their photographs one of the boys grabs his penis and waggles it furiously, an angry expression on his face as if to say “Isn’t this what you want? To see poor Africans living in the bush, naked? Well take a photo and pay me then!”

When we arrive at our allocated village a guide (who is not a Mursi person – none of the guides or “rangers” who “look after” them are Mursi people) indicates that we should park in the only shady spot, under a big tree, already occupied by the village’s elderly men. Paul says to him “There are people in the shade already” and the guide assures us “If you drive your car in they will move.” Which is pretty much the tone of the day. The non-Mursi people of the area regard the Mursi as oddities, irrational, backwards, wild. The Mursi crowd around us, touching us, asking for items of clothing or jewellery and demanding photos. The “ranger” and the guide attempt to control them by shouting at them or physically wrangling them away from us. The longer we stay the more aggressive they become, pinching us, grabbing my breasts, yelling at us. It is an extremely strange experience, and I think you can see in the photo my ambivalence at the situation. The men, for the most part, have no lip plates and are able to remain dignified and quiet watching from the shade. The men collect all the money for the village visit ( 100 birr per person, about $8) and the women only get the money for their individual photos. ( 3 – 4 birr)

We will see if lip plating continues very far into this century. As far as I can tell it is the women who bear all the stigma, disfigurement and harm (two to three teeth are knocked out from the front of their bottom jaw, causing them to continually drool) and it is the men who gain most of the benefit; the money that tourists bring coming to see this unusual practice.

19 February Strawberry Fields, Konso

Before leaving Jinka we stopped briefly at the museum which has exhibitions exploring the practices of lip-plating, female genital mutilation (in which all the external genitalia including the clitoris are removed) and ritual wife-beating, all common practices in the area, are explored. Women who do not have a lip plate are not considered valuable. Those who do not remove their clitorises are considered to be “like men” because the clitoris is “something male.” Women without extensive welts on their backs from whippings are considered to be cowards.

In the afternoon at Strawberry fields we are relaxing drinking tea when we hear the hair raising sound of thousands of people chanting. As we watch, from our position on top of the hill, thousands of singing men and women armed with machetes and automatic weapons march into town. Are they going to war? No, they are on their way to celebrate in Konso the completion of a dam project.

Strawberry fields has its own vegetable gardens and does the best food we have had in weeks – Big Salad!

20 February Dorze Lodge

Dorze Lodge is set on top of a hill overlooking Lake Awasa and the Arba Minch surrounds. After a day spent looking at the famous weaving houses and buying a couple of beautiful cloths we relax at Dorze enjoying a huge bonfire on the hill. The young people from the village come in a sort of semi – formal arrangement for entertainement. They sing their unique local songs and dance, but they seem to enjoy it as much as they enjoy the small payment for it. There is no face paint or grass skirts or spears, just a jolly good time, a bottle of rot-gut gin and the full moon rising over the lake.

21 February - Yabello Hotel

Nothing like ending a hard days driving with a disgusting dark, cramped shower that smells like a urinal and a squat toilet that is even worse. (Flush, people! If it’s brown, flush it down!) And cap that off with rude staff and camping in a parking lot surrounded by running engines. Why don’t the drivers of tour groups ever turn their engines off? And why doesn’t anyone ever steal their cars?

22 February - Wondo Genet Lodge

You can’t win them all and sometimes you can’t even win a couple. The (2003) guide book raves about this place. And other people we met said that it is their favorite place in Ethiopia. I sure hope they were just extending typical African enthusiasm and politeness about our venture and not being serious. Because Wondo Genet Lodge is run down. State owned, no one cares if you leave happy or not. In fact, it seems like they would rather you left dissatisfied because then they don’t have to bother with you or your friends giving them more work to do. They are quite happy collecting a wage and watching DSTV thank you very much.

After a harrowing days driving on bad roads, watching merciless people whipping their skeletal, bleeding horses and donkeys into pulling loads that they simply cannot carry, we arrive at the very strange, empty lodge that was supposed to be a hot – spring Shangri-la. A futuristic glass design, similar to a giant perspex egg box is dingy and decrepit – the crowning feature of the lodge.

At the actual hot spring down the road it’s not so bad. The four of us at least get a pounding hot shower that even mangages to clean the filthy cracks that have appeared in my heels. Its easily the cleanest I have been in months.

23 February - Wim’s Holland House, Addis Ababa

At lunch time we say our goodbyes- Urs and Luzia will stay in a Hotel while they are in Addis, and we are heading to the only camping site. We expect to lose each other as the traffic intensifies closer to the centre. It has been a very successful convoy, and I am sad to say goodbye. As predicted, on the outskirts of town matatus and buses and private cars all form a crush to get to the centre the quickest and we lose them. It is five pm, a stressful hour to enter Addis, but now that Paul has driven in Nairobi he can drive anywhere. Eight lanes of traffic converging and no traffic lights? That’s nothing for the Nairobi graduate.

We have made it to Addis Ababa, and we are a little closer to England and to home. The foreigners supermarkets are better than I expected, carrying tinned beans and oats from South Africa, and real Kalamata olives and tapenade from the continent. We feel a little closer to Europe now, and can stock up well again for the next Northern Ethiopia leg.

Looking forward to posting again, with the beauty of Northern Ethiopia and being that little bit closer to home. 　

　

This post is all about Gorillas. Being in the presence of these gigantic herbivores that are so similar to us, and so contentedly benevolent was certainly one of the peak experiences of my life. ( A co-traveller we met rang her husband in the states the day she tracked them and told him “this was even better than our wedding day!”)

I was lucky enough to find a second hand copy of Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey in Nairobi, so that I could learn something about the animals and their environment before we tracked them. Gorillas in the Mist is a conservation classic and a great read in it’s own right. Fossey’s sharp observations about Gorilla behaviour, Rwanda, her visitors and her own emotions and thought processes are completely fascinating.

The habitat of the mountain gorilla (the proper taxonomy is actually gorilla gorilla berengi, the more common lowland gorilla is the gorilla gorilla gorilla but I couldn’t resist using it for the title) traverses the borders of The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. It is a volcanic mountain range comprised of both extinct and active volcanoes. The active volcanoes located in the DRC erupt, on average, once every two years. On the Rwanda side these are the Virunga mountains, where Fossey lived with “her” gorillas, Digit and Uncle Bert, and on the Uganda side they are the Mgahinga range. We chose to track the gorillas in Uganda because we had heard from other people who had gone recently that the visitor numbers were low, and there was a possibility that we would be able to track the gorillas as part of a very small group (i.e. just the two of us.)

First we went to an office in Kabale that had a Uganda Wildlife Authority van parked out front, and lots of literature about tracking the gorillas inside. We thought this was an official office, until the slightly seedy man in a black leather jacket told us that all gorilla permits were taken for the next month, and that if we wanted to go track them we would need to pay him an additional $100US to secure the permits. This seemed fishy to us, so we left, and went to the genuine UWA office in Kisoro, who told us immediately that there were no bookings for the next two days, and if we wanted to go then we could, and be on our own. Perfecto.

12th December 2010 – Sunday

We set the alarm for five thirty and ate a quick breakfast of tea and fruit while it was still dark and misty. The hotel clerk, obviously unsatisfied by our plan to have peanut butter sandwiches for lunch took it upon himself to find us something more suitable. He returned with two hot Rolexes – a local snack of an omelette wrapped in chapatti – and packed them in foil tins for our lunch. After a slippery half hour drive up the rain slicked roads to the UWA welcome office we organised our bags and had a briefing.

The gorilla groups move continually around the mountains as they graze. Some people who tracked gorillas in Bwindi told us that they were a little disappointed by the experience because the gorillas turned out to be only 15 minutes walk from their camp.

We were not to have such luck. Pointing to a map of Mgahinga, our guide showed us roughly where he thought the gorillas were, based on where park rangers left them making their night nests the previous afternoon. He was pointing almost at the top of the mountain. My heart sank. We would be driving to the bottom of the route, starting at about 2200 metres above sea level, and climbing straight up to around 4000 metres.

Cape Town’s Table mountain was enough of a challenge, at a mere 1000m climb from bottom to top. And at least when we climbed table mountain I hadn’t already been sitting in a car for a year. Gorilla tracking after a year of physical indolence is torture. A few minutes into the march, which was like climbing up a “down” escalator that has been helpfully covered in mud, I was breathless and tired. After ten minutes I had to beg for a break to catch my breath and let my thumping heart slow down. I try everything trick I know to keep myself going up: counting steps, counting breaths, putting one foot in front of the other and concentrating on finding the gorillas at the end.

After about an hour of jungle step class we arrive at a small concrete installation, where water is being collected and filtered and then piped to the villages at the foot of the mountain. This is one of the projects designed to improve the quality of life for people living closest to the gorillas which our payment funds. We fill up our water bottle here – after just an hour we have nearly finished two litres already.

After a few minutes rest we begin to track along the side of the mountain instead of straight up it. Shortly, we leave the path and our pace even more as we wait for the trackers who are cutting a fresh path for us with their machetes. This is the time when we are going slowly enough to appreciate the alien and unique jungle that we are in. We pass though a thicket of bamboo forest, where the ground is littered with clusters of translucent seeds. All over the ground are water clear, perfectly spherical beads stuck together in clumps. To my surprise they turn out to actually be bead of ice. I find it incredible that the ground should freeze, and in such an eccentric way, in what I (despite reading gorillas in the mist, which often refers to the freezing conditions) had expected would be steamy African jungle.

We pass out of the bamboo forest into a habitat closer to what I would imagine for gorillas, a dense jungle of ferns and strange mushrooms, deep green and hung everywhere with creepers and vines. The mushrooms are truly fantastic. There are tiny, delicate spreads of lemon yellow bracket fungi striping rotting logs, and crystal mushrooms spreading tiny parasol heads over long, delicate stalks.

We make our way through this virgin forest with difficulty. It is a big challenge for bipedal animals to follow knuckle walking animals through narrow gaps the dense foliage.

Gorillas, it seems, will only cross water if they can do it without getting wet. The group that we are following has pushed a fallen log across a ravine, and to follow them we must cross it too. The trackers gingerly cross it, gradually getting bolder in their tests of the dead trunk’s strength. They form a kind of human bridge for us, holding on to us continually as we walk across the mossy log. Another thirty minutes of very pleasant rambling through the jungle passes, pausing now and again to let the trackers pick up the trail when they lose it, when we arrive at last nights’ night nests. These are gorilla sized crop-circles of flattened vegetation, that have each been marked with the animals’ morning poo. This is good news, because it means that after about two and a half hours walking we have finally joined onto today’s trail. I start to feel very excited, and the next half hour of trekking glides by, all the pain and difficulty totally smoothed over when I spy, up in a tree, the huge black form of a mature male “blackback” gorilla.

The trackers quickly hustle us to the front for the best view of the large male, placidly munching leaves from his comfortable seat in the fork of a tree. He is much bigger than a man, probably as tall as a man but very round, his dense mass centred around the central tank of his belly. He continues on with his lunch for about five minutes before deciding that he has had enough of being scrutinised, he reaches his long shaggy black arm up to a branch, swings of his perch, gracefully descends the trunk and is gone.

We then push forward towards the main body of the group where we encounter a huge silverback guarding two females and three babies of different ages. The silverback utters a warning scream at us, not to come too close, which causes the trackers to intensify the communications that they are having with the group. Just before we spotted the blackback I noticed that the trackers had begun making two strange noises, one that is a bit like a cow mooing and another that sounds how I imagine the word “man” would sound if a gorilla could learn to say “man.” It comes out all low and throaty, like ” Mu-uhn.” Throughout the rest of the visit, whenever the gorillas seem uncertain or anxious the trackers intensify these sounds, which seem to reassure the gorillas that the people here are known to them and not a threat.

The silverback relaxes a little, and we are able to relax and watch him, his impressive, massive bulk, solid as a small car or a big lead safe and totally alert and sentient. A female in the tree above him has a tiny baby clinging to her body, and another female has an older toddler who is clumsily negotiating the platforms of vines and branches above the silverback. A third baby is the victim of poachers. A wire snare can be clearly seen around her neck. Intended for antelope, gorillas are frequent victims of the cruel traps that resulted in so many of the agonising, drawn out poacher related deaths that Dian Fossey witnessed and recorded in her book.

Because gorilla populations are so critically endangered, a short time after Dian Fossey was murdered a team moved in to the Virungas and started to do something that had never been done with wild animals before. They are a veterinary team, and their mandate is to intervene when gorillas are injured as a result of encounters with humans. They remove snares and autopsy dead gorillas to stay abreast of the threats humans pose to their survival. Because gorillas are so genetically similar to humans, they are vulnerable to many of our diseases, but do not have a population large enough to have a few members withstand an epidemic and so develop immunity to our diseases. Instead they all just die. After an entire gorilla group recently was wiped out by a human strain of measles, the decision was taken by the veterinarians to vaccinate all of the habituated gorillas (the gorillas trained to accept visits from humans) with human measles vaccine.

Today we have a veterinarian from that project with us. He is assessing the snared gorilla and making a plan for an intervention. Gorillas, including habituated groups, are fiercely protective of their young. The silverback in a group will die before he allows a baby from the group to be taken, and it is usual that most of the adults in a group will have to be killed in order to take a baby for the pet market or for a zoo. Silverback gorillas are unusual in the animal kingdom because if the mother of a baby gorilla dies they will take over the care of the baby, feeding it, playing with it and allowing it to sleep in their night nest. So the medical treatment of one small member of the group actually has to be a strategic intervention involving the whole group, and quite a lot of sedatives.

Taken as a whole this experience was incredible, but there were some aspects to it that I didn’t like which I hope will improve as the industry matures. Dian Fossey was firmly opposed to this kind of gorilla tourism, and I am sure that a lot of what she feared would happen is exactly what has come to pass; although having said that, it is very difficult for me to imagine how the “gorillas in the mist” would have survived another 30 years without her to protect them, if the governments of the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda were not massively profiting from their preservation. Uganda alone earned 80 million dollars just from gorilla permit sales last year.

The gorilla trackers clearly regard the gorillas as a strange commodity, rather than as peaceful animals that have a right to be protected and to exist. I feel that there is a lingering resentment that white people will come and pay an amount of money that represents a whole years’ wage to them, to come and see an animal for an hour, but those same people don’t see fit to help human Ugandans with similar enthusiasm. There is a general feeling amongst ordinary Ugandans that white people think that gorillas are more important than black people*.

To my surprise, our trackers ignored the strict rules about transmission of diseases by getting themselves, and us, very close to the gorillas. We were within two metres of a mature male “blackback” at one point. One of the trackers had a camera with him, which he was using to take photos of other trackers in front of the huge animal. The trackers struck macho poses, always keeping a machete in their hand. At one point one of the trackers waved his machete at the gorilla, who severely flinched and looked to the ground in a gesture of fear and submission.

This was not the experience of a harmonious encounter with these great animals that I had hoped for. I am very saddened that they seemed more to tolerate us because they respect our superior savagery, rather than because they are familiar with us and know that we will not do them any harm. The habituation that Dian Fossey and her assistants engaged in was something completely different, a gradual, respectful process of mutual interest and acceptance, that never involved the use of threat or dominance or weapons. Those are all things that have been introduced to expedite a tourist experience and make the greatest possible financial gain.

On that cheery note I just wanted to remark on something else that is totally puzzling: we all know that the pound has totally crashed, but you know that things are really wrong in the world when English labour is cheaper than African labour.

While we were staying in Fort Portal, Uganda, we had dinner at a guesthouse where a group of builders from the UK were also staying. About twelve of them, including a project manager, had been flown out by their UK company to build a school. I was puzzled by this: surely the Ugandan government could build ten schools for the price of flying out all these English lads, housing them (in a four star place with hot water and wi fi) feeding them, and paying them their usual wage in English pounds. No, said the project manager – it is cheaper this way, because by the time the Local Ugandan Authorities have divided up the money between all the people who claim to require payment, there is no money left to build the school. The most cost effective way to make sure that the school that is planned is the school that gets built it to fly English builders in and get them to do it.

* * *

At this present minute ( twenty past eight in the evening, 27^th December 2010) Paul and I are at Jungle Junction, back in Nairobi, the land of soymilk and strawberries. We are waiting for the inconvenience of the Christmas / New year period to pass so that we can organise our onward visas for Ethiopia (which very inconveniently must be processed in our home countries.) I don’t expect much to happen in the next couple of weeks: we will be lounging in Nairobi, reading books and eating well. After that; Ethiopia. We have heard that internet coverage there is next to non-existent. I will do my best to bring you an online update, but you may have to wait for Egypt.

For now, we wish all of our readers a peaceful and wonderful 2011, and are looking forward to catching up in person with all of you in the new year.

* I came to this conclusion mainly from reading literature in the Uganda Wildlife Authority and some other pamphlets that have been provided by NGO’s to schools and villages in an attempt to educate ordinary Ugandans about the importance of conserving gorillas. A common format for these pamphlets was question and answer between a cartoon villager and a kindly educator. The most common question which appeared in many forms was “Why do white people care more about animals than people?”

It’s the first of December, the beginning of the festive month as they keep reminding us on the radio, but it has already been at least three months that supermarkets here have been piping Christmas Carols into the aisles.

A pair of life size mechanical Santas who swing their hips and laugh salaciously were obviously too rude for America, are so living in exile in Nakumatt Kigali, bringing Elvis the pelvis to the heart of darkness.

We’ve been in Kigali for four days now and have visited three of the genocide sites. The central memorial in Kigali is an education centre as well as a mass grave for 250,000 people. Two brick churches on the edge of Kigali were briefly used as a sanctuary before government forces and their supporters stormed the churches and killed everyone inside. The wall of the Sunday School still bears a ghost-like bloodstain marking the spot where the pupils were bashed to death.

The bloodied clothing remains draping the pews and hundreds of skulls and bones from the disassembled bodies are neatly stacked on metal trays. Representing the horror of a million people murdered in one hundred days, while allowing the communities that surround them who survived these events to get on with their lives seems to be an impossible balance. Having visited Tuol Sleng and the killing fields I feel strongly that I want to pay respect to the people who died in these tragedies and give strength to my own conviction that citizens of wealthy countries must do more to demand that their governments show an interest in the welfare of the weak.

As we travel in Rwanda visiting memorials will form a large part of how we choose where we go and what we see.

To pick up where we left off…

5 November – Lake Nkuruba Camp, Kibale Forest Uganda.

It’s all about the monkeys in Uganda. Kibale forest offers Chimpanzee trekking, and at our campsite two large groups of Vervet and Black and White Colubus monkeys pass through a couple of times each day (being sure to pass through the restaurant kitchen to snag scraps on every lap.) Our campsite on the edge of the crater has a view over the lake that looks directly into the tree tops, so all their acrobatics occur at eye level even though they may be fifteen metres off the ground. We spend a few relaxing days here in a regular rhythm, up early to have breakfast and watch the monkeys, sometimes getting showered with green pods as they eat their breakfast overhead. Then we go out walking, exploring the rolling crater lakes region. The cool moist altitude favours tea and coffee plantations as well as bananas. The massive lakes harbour otters and kingfishers and tiny fish. In the afternoon the thunderheads that have been massing since morning let loose their loads and wash the possibility of doing anything but drinking tea and reading clean away. Our favourite places in Uganda have no running water and no electricity. As soon as the sun sets it is coolness and quiet. We read huddled under blankets with little torches until it is time for bed.

12 November CVK Bandas

At breakfast they give us one big stick each to keep the monkeys away. Unlike the group at Nkuruba, who have never been fed by humans and treat us as a neutral quantity, these monkeys have been used to being fed by humans, and can‘t understand why it doesn‘t happen anymore. Consequently they are bold and quite aggressive if you refuse to hand over your banana.

On the road to the Bigodi we see impressively huge black Chimpanzees crossing the road, as well as big groups of olive baboons that sit by the road side all day waiting for scraps thrown from cars. We take a guided tour of the Bigodi swamp, a project set up by a peace corps volunteer to preserve the biodiversity of the swamp (to complement the nearby forest that was already a reserve) and provide income to the communities affected by having wild animals (like crop raiding monkeys) live so close.

13 November Agip motel, Mbarara

We are driving south to Mbarara when we hit a patch of radio reception that allows us to hear the breathtaking news that Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from house arrest.

14 November Lake Bunyoni Overland Resort

A few quiet days on the lake cleaning out the car, doing lots of laundry by hand and getting rid of all the plastic bags in preparation for Rwanda.

Things that are illegal in Rwanda:

Plastic bags. ($10 per bag fine) Walking on the grass (i.e. on the median strip or next to the pavement.) Asking someone if they are a Hutu or a Tutsi. Revising or challenging the official version of the genocide.

18 November – The Golden Monkey Guesthouse Kisoro.

We are in the border town thinking for sure that Rwanda will have sent my visa. You have to apply online in advance and they claim that the process takes three days. It has been a week since I completed the form in Fort Portal. But still there is no visa. We meet a couple in the Internet Cafe suffering similar, if more serious woes. Nick, an English politician has no visa problems but has exposed the bone in his elbow thanks to a spill off the moto (Motorbike taxi.) His girlfriend Eeva was turned back at the border for not having a Visa (Bloody Lying Planet telling us you can get one at the border!) and he is gallantly refusing to proceed to Kigali hospital without her. Nick and Eeva, with a combination of doggedness and pure grit do manage to get over the border and, I am pleased to say, to a hospital and a full recovery. We decide to just go chill in the mountains for a few more days.

The road from Kisoro to Nkuringo is a tableau of village life. In the bottom of the valley children and adults are quarrying stones from the hillsides, to build the sturdy stone houses and the stone walls that surround them. Higher up the mountain men and boys work by the river shovelling clay and shaping it into bricks. Cross hatched piles home made bricks stand drying along the road sides. The houses we pass are all coloured the same distinctive ochre colour, with wooden doors and shutters made from the eucalyptus that men are cutting and sawing into planes by the side of the road. These houses are surrounded by fields, corn intercropped with beans, or thick hedglike fields of closely staked peas. There are banana plantations and avocado trees hanging with more fruit than people can eat. The hills suddenly soar steeply upward, cultivated with sparse bulwarks of eucalypts vainly trying to keep the hillsides in place. Here and there small sodden landslips slide into the road. The women cultivating these fields lean on sticks as they negotiate the steep hilsides.

We reach the top of the hills and drive directly into a white out. We are in the clouds, flashes of lightning and thunder surround us. Later in the evening when the clouds clear the ridge of volcanic mountains emerges; clearly visible is the rich orange glow of lava in the Goma volcano, just 60km away in Congo.

21^st November Sunday

You can choose to have your bread “salt” or “sweet”; we prefer salt bread but today we’re having the bread made with sugar and eggs and cream because the salt was sold out and it is easy to see why people like it. It is like eating pastry for breakfast. Yummy. We need to load up on sugar because in the afternoon we are hiking in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest national park. Our guide is a Ugandan version of Steve Urkel, except he seems quite sound on his feet. He wears ¾ length adventure pants and his socks pulled up, carries a thick bird identifying book and wears and earnest, eager expression throughout the day. I appreciate his intense excitement as he points out the forest’s endemic species; the black banded trogon and yellow eyed fly catcher.

Some gorilla groups live exclusively deep in the forest, but others are fringe dwellers, living close to the boundary of forest and farm land. Farmers have problems with almost all the wildlife: many birds and small primates are damaging (and skilful) crop raiders. Elephants can decimate a field in minutes (my dad should be grateful to only have wrangle kangaroos to wrangle with) and there are also Gorillas. Strangely, gorillas don’t really like the bananas that humans cultivate for themselves. Given a choice they prefer to eat the soft core of the banana tree which of course destroys the whole plant and is very destructive to a plantation. There is a project running here called HuGo (short for Human / Gorilla) which provides volunteers who come and chase gorillas out of your garden if they are running amok. They also provide compensation to farmers for the damage caused. Also, the government bought back a 12km “buffer zone” of farmland that is now being regenerated by the “guardians of the forest” -the gorillas. As gorillas use the buffer land they leave their droppings behind, all of which contain the seeds from their favourite food plants. So the buffer zone is rich in all the gorillas favourite foods.

We pass from the reclaimed farmland into the primary forest, an antediluvian paradise of tree ferns and moss and giant vines. Chimpanzees also live here along with dozens of other primates and it is easy to visualize the jungle gym this forest provides. It rains intermittently the whole time we are walking, providing welcome relief in the steamy jungle. This truly is a “rain forest” with several crystal rivers that serve the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda beginning here.

The 16km hike takes us all afternoon, ending by gruellingly reclaiming of all the altitude we lost descending into the valley. It is getting dark as we complete the hill, passing people returning from a Sunday spent relaxing with Banana gin in the village. They are red eyed and somewhat unsteadily on the narrow, dark and muddy path that winds along the edge of the mountain and I don‘t envy them at all! We arrive at home, cold and wet and in total darkness (none of the homes in this area have electricity) and are greeted with candlelight, pumpkin soup, fresh rolls, a rosti and pineapple pancakes to finish.

22 November Lake Bunyoni Overland Resort

Pete and Louis rented a lemon in Kampala; it already broke down on them once this morning it is again refusing to move. So now they have the dilemma of what to do when you rent a car on one side of the country, drive it to the other side, and it breaks down hours before your flight. Under the bonnet is an assortment of car parts that seem to have been collected in a scrap yard and tossed in at random. It must have been black magic keeping the thing working, and now the ju ju has just run out. They decide to leave the car and get a lift with us to Kabale, and they demonstrate the adage “good company is the best short cut” entertaining us with travel anecdotes and interesting trivia.

In the evening Paul and I are having dinner at the Bunyoni Overland Resort restaurant when we are drafted into a short promotional clip being made by a cameraman who works for the BBC. I will try and find the clip on you tube and post the link here.

24 – 26 November Amagara Guesthouse, Kabale Uganda.

At least if Rwanda is going to continue to mess me around with my visa it is nice to stay somewhere with a great restaurant and excellent food as well as very cheap rooms, electricity and hot water. After two days of skyping (much better than using a regular phone where you have to pay a huge flag fall every time Rwanda picks up the phone and hangs it straight back up again) the visa finally appears in my in box. Hooray!

At long last we have made it to Kigali, centre and stage for a horrendous genocide and one of the most important events of the 20^th century. We’ve visited the mass graves at the memory centre and the hotel des Mille Collines, a strange, out-of-this-world place that lets you look down on the valley full of houses where survivors live and collect their household water in jerry cans as you relax in the sparkling pool and sip tea. That said, I am very impressed by Kigali. We are staying at the Discover Rwanda hostel, which has more long term residents working for charities than tourist guests. They say that it is very pleasant here: particularly remarkable is that it is safe to walk around at night. Certainly, the control of the country that Paul Kagame has is very tight. Armed soldiers patrol the streets like beat policemen, there is a dictatorship and no free speech. But as Shannon (a Masters student working at the genocide memorial) says, most of the people who live here are willing to accept those things if it means that they can move out of the shadow of the fear of another genocide occurring.

We’ve crossed from Kenya into Uganda which is, at first glance a much more laid back place. We were loving Uganda: people are genuinely friendly and helpful including government officials and regular people who are not trying to benefit financially from you. The land seems lush and fertile and well cultivated and life is much more affordable. Looking more closely you can see the illegal charcoal makers chasing the forests up the mountains, into extinction, and the farms that are exhausting the land they recently cleared. Making the headlines is the campaign by some ministers; Christian and government, to bring in the death penalty for homosexuality. It’s the usual story that’s not just a lack of human rights for minorities, but active demonising of them to unite the “rest” and gain political mileage.

It would be funny if it was a spoof, but like George Bush the lies that they are printing are so extreme, that they are impossible to satirise. So far, so African, the usual intensity of the both the bitter and the sweet.

Thursday 14^th October – Jungle Junction Nairobi

Andrew and Lucy, friends who have followed us at our super slow rate since Windhoek delightfully reappear on our path again at Jungle Junction. We have a very nice day together, with me cramming as much healthy food down their under-nourished necks as I can. The backpacker’s recovery salad is the centre piece of this intervention.

Backpacker’s recovery salad:

Combine: one tin of chickpeas, one handful of parsley finely chopped, two medium beetroots, grated, one small onion finely chopped, two medium carrots, grated, as much garlic as you like (I use four cloves, minced) one red and one yellow pepper diced into tiny cubes, two tomatoes, diced, one small cucumber, diced, juice of one lemon, salt and pepper to taste, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar if you have it and a slurp of olive oil.

We had it it with brown bread and hummus. Yummy!

Friday15^th October

Haraka haraka haina baraka

…is swahilli for “Hurry, hurry makes bad luck.” I read this in Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari last night and copied it into my note book. And how prophetic it turns out to be. The electrics on the car are finally fixed and so all we need to do is buy a stove before we can leave. Paul is excited to get going on our afternoon errands, but an unfortunate cluster of events; Jungle Junction emptying the sewage tanks on to the grass under our car, (yes, really) me getting stuck talking to a neighbour, mean that Paul isn’t giving the full attention to reversing that he should be. I am chatting away and then suddenly *bang!* Paul has backed the car into a tree and bent one of the back doors in so severely that it is inoperable. Noooooooo!! Let us go, Nairobi, please!

Saturday 16^th October

A slow start to the day as we collect options for fixing the door. Chris, the manager of JJ’s thinks we need to buy a new one. One of the Kenyan mechanics reckons he knows a panel beater who could fix it. Or there is the option of a bit of “bush mechanics” – one suggestion is to tie a rope around the spare wheel mount and drive forward, pulling the dented door back out into shape. As luck would have it, we have a very talented German neighbour who played the French horn professionally for twenty years. It turns out that French horns suffer from regular deformations, requiring their owners to become metalworkers as well as musicians. With Paul and Wolfgang strategically placing blocks of wood on the inside and outside of the damaged door, and me in the driver’s seat reversing against the same sturdy tree that we ran into (and fervently hoping that the bent glass wouldn’t explode out of the window) we gradually bent the door back into shape. It looks a bit mangled, but it opens and closes now and so we can leave.

Sunday 17^th October – Jungle Junction Nairobi

Big provisions shop at Nakumatt, and we bought a new stove.

Monday 18^th October – Jungle Junction, Nairobi

We are pretty ready to leave Nairobi, except that it rained this morning (always, the morning that we want to leave) and our laundry is wet. It is lucky that this delay causes Paul to consider checking if the new stove works. It doesn’t. I spend the morning pleasantly, going to Ya-ya, having a coffee at the French café, exchanging my books, buying fresh bread and vegetables for dinner. In the afternoon Paul has to go through quite a few levels of manangement to get a refund on the faulty stove. We bit the bullet, went to the camping store and bought an expensive one (about $100 AU) instead of the cheapie.

Tuesday 19^th October – Carnelly’s camp, lake Naivasha.

Finally, escaped Nairobi. Carnelly’s camp is beautiful, on a slight rise over lake Naivasha with a view of the massive lake, as well as incredibly lush wide green lawns with shade trees to camp under. The grass is so lush that walking through it is like wading in shallow water. We walk out onto the spongy jetty with some trepidation but don’t see any hippos. They are all concealed, laughing as usual (“Huruumph, humph, humph…”) in the pampas grass. After dinner we have tea in the restaurant and read by the open fire, partly because fires are nice, partly because it’s freezing cold, and partly because despite the cold there are clouds of mosquitoes the size of humming birds. Seriously. It’s kind of good, you can easily see them coming and grab them in your hand, but if they bite you, you’d better eat a buiscuit afterwards or you’re going to pass out. The fire seems to repel them a little.

Thursday 21^st October – Carnelly’s camp, lake Naivasha

Picnic packed, thermos filled with greenish boiled lake water that smells a bit like cooked fish (strong tea seems to mask it so it doesn‘t really matter) we head out to Hell’s gate national park for the day. It took Paul about half an hour to sort through all the push bikes on offer at Hell’s Gate to find two with acceptable brakes for us to hire. It is eight kilometres from the entrance to the park to the Entrance to Hell, a fairly flat and easy bike ride and incredible to be on a push bike in the open amongst zebras and antelope and warthog. The gorge picnic site is patrolled by huge, bold baboons who have no fear of people, laying hands on our table ready to steal our back pack the minute one’s back is turned. Paul quickly wedges one sandwich into his mouth while standing, finding the baboons too aggressive and the picnic site too tense. Hell is a small gorge, the grand canyon in minature; at points you can touch both sides with outspread hands. A small creek flows through it, and it is prone to flash floods. Tiny hot springs bubble out of cracks intermittently and the floor is littered with huge hunks of volcanic glass, snowflake obsidian. Our Masaai guide paints us with the traditional ochre markings of Masaai men and women in a bid to secure the fee for guiding us. The Masaai, though iconic and probably the most recognisable tribe in the world, are being excluded from their traditional areas which were taken over, first by the colonial government and now by the neo-colonial Kenyans who supposedly took responsibility for the country at independence, but really are only interested in taking over the very effective systems for funnelling resources out of the country that the British put in place. The scarcity of jobs means that only people who know people can get a job in the Kenyan Wildlife service, or at one of the posh lodges. Maasai people, traditionally subsistence people with little economic or political power are disenfranchised and forced to eke a living in the margins of the park, guiding when they can, but unable to depend on a regular wage. Even though he forced himself on us (we repeatedly said we didn’t want a guide) at the end we paid him, partly because he was helpful and partly because things really are difficult for the Masaai.

　

Friday 22^nd October – the Midleands Hotel, Nakuro.

We are trying to get to Lake Baringo, but with the combination of a not very accurate map, no GPS and the problem of the cultural gap between the way Africans give directions, and the way we want to receive them, we are not successful. We spend the afternoon doing a wide lap of a hopeless road, that takes us out into rural Kenya, houses that each have a patch of farmland, some chickens and cows, and little churches, schools, vegetable plots. It is a view of a different world to the ashphalt paved one that I live in. We don’t find lake Baringo, and end up back in Nakuro, at the Midlands Hotel, a very reasonably priced establishment with a nice restaurant, a movie channel and a bathtub. Bliss. We are just collecting our bags from the car as the first heavy drops of rain start to fall out of the thunder.

Saturday 23^rd October – Robert’s Camp.

I was expecting a western style breakfast buffet, but instead had my first glimpse at what well heeled Kenyans eat for breakfast. They eat spinach, lentils, sweet potato and porridge. And pancakes and omlette and lots of fruit. There was no meat in sight. Not for breakfast, anyway. We stop for photos as we cross the equator, and arrive at Robert’s camp, lake Baringo just after lunch. Robert’s camp has a lot to live up to if it is to fufill all the good things that we have heard about it, and it does. When we arrive there are two hippos in the water, about 25 metres from where we set up camp. No electric fences, no barrier of any kind. If you want to walk up to two metre crocodiles that crawl up onto the banks to bask, you can. It’s nice to be in a place where common sense is your fence. Later, when a group of people from an overland truck spot a hippo that has come out of the water to graze, and give chase of the massive animal in a torch weilding, shrieking group, I think (not for the first time and not for the last time, either) “you are the ones who need to be behind a fence.”

Sunday 24^th October – Robert’s Camp

People who can’t afford to stay at Club Baringo can pay a tiny sum to laze around their pool and marvel at the sights and sounds of hippos and crocodiles marching across wide, English style manicured lawns. It’s a nicely lazy Sunday.

Monday 25^th October

Ants are swarming all over the car, using the guy ropes up our awning as little highways. They are totally fascinated by it, with an eight band highway of ants encircling the base of the tent. Only one or two actually inside, though, probably hitching on our clothes, thankfully.

Tuesday 26^th October – Iroko Twigs Hotel Kitale.

Woke before dawn to hear the huffing and snorting of hippos in the water close by. We are up before six am, and the hippos are there, a group of about five, snuffling in the water next to our tent. A long day’s driving again ends in frustration and difficulty. There are very few signposts for anywhere and Africans have different values about giving directions than westerners do. Culturally, there is a strong taboo against giving bad news everywhere in Africa. Which means that if you are going the wrong way, or even if the person simply doesn’t know which is the right way, this is very difficult to find out. Rather than tell you that you have got it wrong, or that they don’t know where you should be going, African peope will often just agree with the direction that you are going in, or give you some random information rather than nothing at all. It is extremely challenging to figure out who actually knows what they are talking about and who is just being polite.
This is made more difficult when you really want the person you are asking to be telling you something factual, it makes you invest a lot of belief and not enough skeptisism. After driving around Kitale for a couple of hours, looking for the Mount Elgon road, we give up and hit the hotel billing itself as the nicest in town. And it very well could be the best: it’s clean, modern and reasonably priced. And the vegetable curry and chapattis for dinner are delicious.

Wednesday 27^th October Moses Campsite, Sipi falls, Uganda.

A cold and sunny morning, reminds me of spring in England when we wake early and take a light breakfast in the front window of the restaurant. Before leaving the crumbling art deco town we have a quick look in the Christian bookshop – eclectic and amusingly translated titles like “how to beat your wife” and “hot tub religeon” – but none of the classics (like Knowing God) give it the feel of many of the shops here, carrying the west’s refuse, the stuff that can’t be sold anywhere else.

It is a full day’s driving on soft, fudgy roads. We have been warned by several people not to attempt this border crossing if it has been raining heavily due to the steep, slippery roads, and we have ended up in a race against the solid black clouds smoothly following behind us. As we cross into Uganda the sky has darkened, and the clouds begin to ominously rumble. It’s three thirty pm: should we press on and try and complete the road before rain and night fall come, or look for somewhere to stay, but risk being trapped just over the border in no man’s land after a night of heavy rain? We decide to press on, backwards and forwardsing along steep and slippery roads as we try to divine which really is the road to Sipi, and try to find a road that is passable all the way. On one route the road has been completely washed away by heavy rains and is virtually impassable.

The first view of Uganda is beautiful, the roads that we are lost in are a lattice across small holdings of corn, cabbages, coffee and sunflowers. The maize harvest is just in and everywhere there are tarps out drying kernels in the sun. Neat round huts are complemented by neat round granaries, full to the brim. It all seems very lovely, until you realise that this is supposed to be Mt Elgon National Park, that this soil which looks so rich and fertile probably was forest a short time ago and will be exhausted soon. And then you notice the charcoal ovens, the bags of burnt trees by the road, and you can see the beginnings of catastrophic erosion, and the scene is less eden, more Africa.

Darkness falls at 6.30pm, we still haven’t reached Sipi, although people keep reassuring us that it is close. We pull up in a village that although full of people, is completely dark. Most of rural Uganda has no electricity, so now that night has fallen it feels that the whole country is in darkness. It is very creepy to be in a town that is so full of people and yet has no lights at all anywhere. A man approaches us asking for a lift, saying that he is going towards Sipi falls and can show us the way. After some deliberation we decide to take him. He says that Sipi falls is only 20kms and our alternative is to try and find someone who will let us camp by their hut in this village in the dark. Actually, Sipi falls is 70km and more than three hours on a heavily potholed road away. We do eventually make it, and there is one good thing about having our hitchiker.

I had told myself that if we came to an unofficial roadblock at night that I would do a U-turn and head the other way. Only how do you tell what is official and what is not in Uganda, and what if there is nothing but darkness back the way that you just came? I am driving when ahead of us we can see two men, one with a machine gun in uniform standing by two logs and a tyre in the road. Francis, our hitchiker, reasuures us that it is nothing to worry about, that they are looking for people trafficking charcoal, in a bid to protect the forest. Sure enough they wave us through. I think I would have had a heart attack and died if he had not been in the car to explain what was going on.

At 10.30 we arrive at Sipi falls, totally exhausted. We drive to all the lodges listed in the guide book, but everyone has gone to bed. Not even the posh lodge has a conscious nightwatchman. It seems likely that we are going to be sleeping in the car in shifts when a man approaches us, and offers to wake up the owners of Moses camp. He leads us into a deserted campsite, and is as good as his word.

Thursday 28^th October Moses Campsite, Sipi falls.

When we arrived the campsite was just a little patch of lawn, two pit toilets, no sinks or running water and a couple of huts. This morning the beauty of the spot is unveiled: it’s like the whole of lush Uganda is spread out beneath us, with the magnificent Sipi falls off to one side. We have a rest day, recovering from a long stressful day’s driving without stops for lunch or dinner. Our only errand is to town to use the ATM to get some Ugandan shillings, but the machine doesn’t pay out.

Saturday 30th October Nile River Explorers Camp, Jinja Still no shillings coming from the ATM in Sipi, so we are stuck. Lucky for us, some Dutch people who have been travelling in parallel with us since Roberts camp change some $US for us, and we are able to pay our bill and leave. The problem with the ATMs is not limited to Sipi – two more towns still are not able to provide us with any money. Only when we arrive in Jinja do we manage to get some cash, just in time to buy lunch at Ozzie’s café. It doesn’t look as flash as some places, but the food at Ozzies is prepared freshly by a lovely Australian woman with care and love. The food is great and the bread that she bakes herself keeps us loving Ozzies for days after. After a quick stop at the open air market to buy spinach, tomatoes, onions, peas, eggplant and carrots, we head to the Nile River Explorers camp which occupies a fabulous spot overlooking the Nile river.

Sunday 31^st October

The site over the Nile is incredible, and it is pleasant to get up early and sit on the deck that overlooks the vast river, but loud music and herds of selfish over landers mean that one night here is enough and two nights is too many. We spend the afternoon swimming in the Victoria Nile (no crocodiles here, apparently) and since we can’t beat them we go to the bar for a few drinks before bed.

Monday 1^st November – Red Chilli Hideaway, Kampala.

An easy 200km drive on good roads from Jinja to Kampala. Shoprite has fry’s vegetarian products in the chiller – Schnitzel for dinner tonight, hooray! Red Chilli is a big place with a great vibe, we plan to stay here a couple of days to update the blog, go out to dinner and see a movie. It’s extremely nice to have electric lighting and to take a shower in water that is safe for drinking again. Is it marvellous or wasteful to take a shower in water clean enough to drink? I can’t decide.

Emptied Wildebeest

Lyin’ Around

Tusker

Baloon Flights over the Mara

Paul packing away the roof tent

Lion’s pot of gold

Paul and our armed guide James

Bloated Nile Crocodile

Sign for the ranger’s camp in the Mara

Lines and lines

Nandi

Making lunch

Tanya making an illegal manouvre

Breakfast

Breakfast

Smile!

It’s thanksgiving in Canada shortly, and the end of Ramadan saw some serious feasting and sleeping here just about a month ago. Something similar is happening out on the Masaai Mara too. It is the holidays. The lions barely have to hunt: thousands upon thousands of wildebeest weakened or injured by the migration simply hobble up on to their plates and collapse, exhausted. The crocodiles are bloated with a drowned buffet of animals unable to fight their way across the strong current of the Mara river. Storks and vultures hop around on the ground, listless with overconsumption. And all the lion’s usual prey? Chillin’. There is no hunting going on. Just bloated predators sleeping in the sun and all the non-wildebeest herbivores mooching about. And the Wildebeest? They sleep in tight circles, everybody trying to push to the middle, the broken and elderly sacrificed on the fringe. We know what sleeping wildebeest look like because we got lost and stuck ovenight in another national park, again.

Wednesday 29th

Talk around the living room at Jungle Junction was all about a recent robbery that went wrong in the Masaai Mara and ended up with a robbery victim being shot dead. None of these occurences get reported in the media, lest they scare off the tourists, but the number of such incidences that we get to hear of along the grape vine is alarming. You get used to Africa and then someone tells you something that wakes you up: like this morning someone was talking about the presence of Typhoid in the water and I thought: I am showering in Typhoid. Two friends of our recently arrived in Uganda and have become infested with mango fly maggots. The flies lays eggs in damp clothing which hatch on warm skin. Lucie has over 40 maggots in her body. But the most amazing parasite in Africa must be this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_worm

I wonder if it is some unconscious reluctance to leave the (relative) safety of Jungle Junction that causes this morning’s error. We had struck out for the Masaai Mara, only to find two hours later that we were back on the fringes of Nairobi. I will plead that it was a rainy day, and so impossible for us to tell by the sun that we had traced a circle. It was all very embarrassing and we spent the afternoon at the super-luxurious Westgate shopping mall consoling ourselves.

Thursday 30th September – Member’s club, Narok.

Another day, another failed attempt to reach the Mara. But we got closer this time. It is hard driving getting out of Nairobi, the pinnacles of selfish driving that people are able to achieve continually impress me. They pursue self interest so far that it crosses over and stops being self interested: they push in front of you so closely that you cannot avoid colliding with them, they block intersections, cause accidents, and hold everyone, including themselves, up.

We eventually arrive on the right road to the Mara, and have pulled up to try and puzzle out an intersection when a man comes running up to us to offer help. He is very kind and grandfatherly, and even draws us a map to help, all very nice until he demands a totally ridiculous fee for a service we hadn’t asked for. Normally we would both simply refuse and continue to negotiate until we arrive at an amount that is reasonable for all of us, but we are somehow vulnerable and frazzled by the driving, and end up giving in to his demands, instantly regretting it. And we spent the next two days regretting it because the map he drew us was total bunkum! Two hours later dark is approaching on a road that may contain wild animals and bandits. It is time to get back to the highway and find some accommodation with security. Surprisingly, we are able to find a place that offers camping. But it turns out to be a bar that lets us put the tent up in the car park, and use the bar toilets. Oh well. The one bright side is the incredible service from the kitchen staff. This place claims to be famous for it’s Nyama Choma (BBQ meat) but it seems that the kitchen staff have a passion for food and service in general. On hearing that we are vegetarian the cook suggests that he take our ingredients (beans and spinach) and prepare a meal for us. Two tusker lagers later,  in walks our white jacket clad chef, carrying silver trays and three gold plated (plastic) faux french tureens, containing spinach, baked beans and white rice. What a meal!

Friday 1st October – Crocodile Camp, Talek Gate, Masaai Mara.

We wait around in Narok for two hours for the ATMs to come back online. Frequently, ATM’s lose the connection with the outside world, and then you just have to wait. Any time a black African man sees me driving they express huge surprise. I am in the car reading when a souvenir seller comes to chat to me through the window. We are double parked, and when I slide over to the drivers seat to let the trapped parker out the man says “You can drive this car!” in an awed tone that would be appropriate if I had just reverse parked an amphibious hovercraft, rather than a plain old a 4WD.

At 2pm we arrive at Crocodile camp and get a spot right on the river Mara. The river is the boundary to the National park, so we set up our awning and chairs and sit and watch wildebeest and the afternoon storm gathering on the horizon. 

Saturday 2nd October

We have a relaxing by the river day in preparation for a pre-dawn start tomorrow. In bed at 9.30pm after an hour of meticulous packing up in the rain to ensure a swift getaway tomorrow morning.

Sunday 3rd October – Wild Camping, Masaai Mara

We get up at 6am with the first light, I wash my face while Paul packs up the tent and we are off.  In the first half an hour of being in the Masaai Mara we spot three lions, all dopey with food. We find a spot for ourselves in amongst a thick crowd of wildebeest to park and drink tea and eat our usual breakfast of  muesli. The rules in the park are meant to be “no getting out of the car, for any reason” but I don’t see how they can possibly expect that given that there are no picnic areas or toilets anywhere.

We cruise around the park all morning, and I start to warm to the idea of getting a nice lunch at one of the high end resorts. We follow the signs to Kekerook lodge, a very nice place, that unfortunately is serving a sumptuous four course banquet on the lawn. I was sort of more thinking of coffee+sandwich+view but that is not on offer here. We wander around the cool and luxurious interior of the hotel for a while before driving on to find a spot to picnic.

At 4pm we reach the Mara river, the site of the famous crossing, and the border of the privately run Mara triangle game reserve. There is suddenly a wall of smell. You feel like you could push it with your hands, but not be able to push it out of the way. Just below where we parked the car there is a bend in the river that has collected over two hundred corpses. The first thing I thought is “this is what the river in Rwanda must have looked like” when the Hutus were dropping Tutsi bodies in their river. One of the rangers offers to take us for a walk along the river, and he has a gun so we are happy to go with him. We walk upstream along the banks spotting hippos, crocodiles and wildebeest along the way. An Indian family have been let out to sightsee. Their guide has just gestured them towards the water and then hopped on his mobile phone. Our ranger tells them “Your guide is not supposed to let you come close to the water alone.” I notice that I feel completely unafraid in the presence of the guide, but would be utterly terrified if, say, we had broken down and I needed to collect water from the river, and I check myself to stay relaxed but vigilant.

At 5pm we get directions from James about how to leave the park. It would be straightforward except that the whole area is an absolute nest of tracks, the rangers and hotel staff alike totally ignoring speed limits and prohibitions about off roading. Hotel owned cars just drive straight off the road and right up to any animals they see, meaning that there is only one or two roads that are obviously “main roads” in amongst thousands and thousands of aimless tracks.

 At 6.30 pm it is the beginning of dark, and we are, again, totally lost. I think that we should just stop and put the tent up before it gets completely dark and the lions become active. Paul does not want to contemplate spending the night in the Mara. He says ”I really do not want to spend the night here. Every few metres there is a new wildebeest corpse. We have to leave.” And I say ”Ok. Even once it is dark we will keep driving. We will be able to see people’s headlights and see which way they are heading and it will be easier.” And about thirty seconds later our headlights conked out. So much for that. We pulled off the road in total darkness, and sat for a minute, debating our options. I did not want Paul to put the roof tent up in the dark, rather just sleep uncomfortably in the car. Paul was adamant that it would be too uncomfortable. In the end, Paul put the roof tent up while I stood behind him with a machete to stop any would be attacker from thinking it could sneak up on him. It was an odd combination of faintly ridiculous and heart pounding terror. 

Once in the roof tent we ate bananas, drank juice and began to dissect how we ended up in this situation again. I was both happy and a little disappointed not to hear the lions roaring in this part of the Mara.

Monday 4th October – Fisherman’s camp, Lake Naivasha.

At five am two trucks rolled past and I suddenly had a horrible thought: that the real threat to our safety probably wasn’t the lions, but rather the illegal poachers who come into the park at night to hunt game. 30% of the meat eaten in Nairobi is not “beef” as they claim, but a mix of zebra and antelope taken illegally from parks and preserves. They passed us a second time at 5.30 am and still didn’t stop. It turned out to be the park’s rangers, strangely incurious about what a tourists’ car was doing out in the middle of the Mara.

At first light we got up and put the roof tent down, and then started trying again to find our way out. It took us two and a half hours to find a main road to the gate. At 5.30pm we arrive at fisherman’s camp on Lake Naivasha, a strong contender to the best campsites in Africa. An electric fence borders the campsites so that hippos can come out and graze where you can see them, but not enter the campsite. While we eat a delicious dinner in the restaurant (bean burgers with lemon and coriander, chips and a big salad) the hippos can be heard huffing and grunting in the lake.

Tuesday 5th October – day things of turning around.

We’re having a relaxing day sitting on the lush lakeside lawn when we get to talking about the future. Looking around on the internet at possible jobs in England and at the dismal pound is causing us to have a serious rethink of where we want to be a year from now.

And then, trying to cook dinner, the stove breaks. For me,  No tea = No travel. I will put up with many hardships but tea is critical. So the plan to head to Uganda and Hell’s gate national park is shelved for now. We are going to have to head back to Nairobi.

Which is where we are, again, waiting for repairs to the electrics and shopping for a new stove. Uganda, next time!

Camping in Heaven

Nairobi Market, street view

I wish this was my school bus

Roundabout Nairobi

Ideal Chicks

God's Nightwatchmen

View from Man Eaters

Tiny Trolleys stop traffic jamsCoffee house Mombassa

When I was in my final year of uni I can remember my tutor saying that for all of us students there would be a moment where we would realise that our thoughts, like the universe, would keep unfolding and expanding forever without any end. He said for some people this would be a liberating experience “Hooray, I can keep thinking forever!” and for other people this would be depressing “Oh, no, this just goes on forever.”

Travelling in Africa I find that I am continually swooping between these two poles. One minute it is wonderful that rules and absolutes don’t exist. I am not superstitious, but after a string of unfortunate occurences I decided to “do as the Romans do” and start burning or flushing my hair. People here never allow parts of their body – like hair –  to fall into the hands of others for fear they may be used in witchcraft.  I have accepted that what is true for me in Australia might not be true in Africa, and was very heartened to find out later that Diane Fossey, scientist and gorilla lover, came to the same conclusion herself saying “where I come from, if you don’t believe in it (witchcraft) you are dead.”  

The considerable downside of relativism is that it makes it very difficult to decide what is the right thing to do, and to gain consensus with other people. This can be fun if you like endless discussing, but I want to know, really, what is helpful for Africans!  I was having a discussion with someone about the fate of secondhand clothing in Africa and boy, that topic shorts out quicker than an electroshower with your finger on it. (Don’t touch ‘em, people. Even by accident.  The’re dangerous.)  

People in first world countries, Europe and America mainly, throw out a lot of clothing. Vast quantities of it get tipped into charity bins where a lot of it is mechanically compressed into big blocks, shrink wrapped and shipped to Africa. It is my impression that a lot of the people donating shoes and clothing are wanting that clothing to go to the poorest of the poor. They want it to go to the people going barefoot and bare chested and wearing shredded filthy trousers. Goodness knows there are plenty of them. But what seems to happen to a very large portion of these clothes is this: from the warehouse they go to a wholesale outlet where individuals can purchase a bale of clothes for a very nominal fee. They buy them blind: there might be some funky guy’s entire collection of threadless branded tees or there might be fifty tee shirts all printed with “do you have crabs?” [ the fine print explaining that it is to do with a blue crab festival somewhere in North America.] Some of them are downright weird. We have seen a  black African wearing a t-shirt saying ”get behind your flag” …with a picture of the confederate flag on it.  But I digress. The bale goes to the market and the market splits it up: jeans go to the jeans guy, baby clothes go to the baby clothes lady, mens shirts…you get the idea. Then these market people sell these clothes for very small money to the main body of the population who is not utterly dirt destitute but who can only afford a few cents. It is true that the clothes are not going to the most needy or the people that “we” intended them to go to. It is also true that it is nearly always the people right at the bottom that get the rawest deal. 

 I am not a pro capitalist person. I don’t believe in evil but I do believe in capitalism and if you ask me for the root of most of what is wrong in the world, that is what my answer will be. However, capitalism is what Africa has (thanks, Dr Livingstone) and these little markets create a lot of jobs and churn a lot of money through different hands without the usual problem if it all ending up being funnelled into one place. And besides this, I love the markets. I just love them. The people are friendly, the clothes are random  – and often brand – label, the food is fresh. And they are everywhere – we have bought shirts and shoes and bags and belts in almost every country we have been in, even the very poorest ones. Malawi and Mozambique are two of the poorest countries in the world and the absolute hub of lively economic development is buzzing around these plastic bag and tarpaulin sheltered markets. So who’s right? Should the clothes go to the poorest for free? Or is it better that they go into the maw of the “free market” in the hope of supporting movement and liquidity and jobs in the economy?  

Wednesday 23rd of August

We spent the day in one of these markets hunting for some second hand hiking boots for Paul. I am convinced that the price is wildly inflated, that the boots are brand new chinese copies rather than a second hand genuine pair. We do a lot of haggling and eventually shell out a whopping $43 for the boots. Hope they last.

Thursday 26th August

Normally I love cities and I love to walk around, but Nairobi is so polluted it is unpleasant even to walk down the street. Ancient buses and trucks hose a continual stream of black smoke down the pavement. Every few metres someone is burning a pile of rubbish. Sometimes people will set a tyre on fire, oh,  just for the hell of it. Walking down the street is like being in a closed garage with a car and the engine  running.

So what is one to do for exercise? I do circuits, every other day when I can. It is a loop of 12 exercises I try to do three times in thirty minutes. It seems to be working well, and usually I can adapt it to suit the terrain and how much privacy I can find. I have found a spot between two permanently parked cars to do the mildly embarrassing exercises that involve balancing and jumping, but a new hazard has emerged. Jungle Junctions’ huge German Shepherd crossed with something…maybe a brown bear. She is almost as big as me. And she finds the sight of me doing mountain climbers ( on hands and toes like for a push up, but instead of moving your arms you rapidly step your feet up and down alternately) very exciting. Today was the second time she has run over to catch me doing them and I had to jump up before she climbed aboard. It is only a matter of time before she figures out that if she waits until the end of the set I will be exhausted to resist her.

Friday 27th August – The New Beginning

Cold and drizzling rain cleans the air for the rebirth of Kenya. The whole country has stopped to welcome in the new constitution, being signed by the government at Uhuru park just down the road. Despite the attempts at pomp and ceremony I don’t think anyone feels very hopeful about it.

Saturday 28th August

If you read any books about Africa written by Africans they all talk about porridge. Fabulous books, the Famished Road, Things Fall Apart, and the one I am reading tonight by a Kenyan Woman called “What does a man want?” All contain lots of porridge.  I have finally figured out why. It is because insect infested grains are not nearly as disgusting when the larve and eggs are boiled past dissolving point, and all the horrible little thready cases…I caught myself saying the other day that although I absolutely cannot eat muesli oats once they are infested, making them into porridge is, well, possible. And then I knew that my mother’s daughter had left the building. The girl whose creed regarding food had always been “if in doubt, throw it out” would have to stand aside for necessity. I have changed. I have gone native.

Monday 30th August

Long term readers of this blog may remember that we loved camping in Hwange National park in Zimbabwe, in no small part due to the extreme hospitality of the campsite attendants. Godfrey, one of them, who shared our meal and told us stories all night long about Lions and Zulus and all the things you can’t read about – he really touched something in us. When we left we gave him food and some books and our mosquito net. (He gets malaria three times a year, and we had never used it. Since then a doctor we met in Malawi who was going home has given us another one. What goes around…) But I kept fantasising about sending him a beautiful parcel of all the things that you can’t get in Zimbabwe unless you are a Zanu PF strong man bullying money out of local businesses. Today was parcel day. We sent; 3 mens shirts (50 cents each at the clothing market) spaghetti, coffee, instant chocolate, TVP, noodles, vitamin C, spices, copies of the international herald tribune and the economist. And a couple of recipes, for the spices. Here’s hoping he gets it, but there’s probably a good chance that a worker at the post office workers will just claim it for themselves. Zimbabwe post – I am going to tell the world if you are good and deliver it safely!

Tuesday 31st August

Haircut day. And we all know how that turned out. Very well, thank you very much.

1 September

My haircut day. I get to go to a professional, lucky me. My new short hair is much less maintenance and uses less shampoo.

Thursday 2nd September

Transit day. It is a long, dirty, dusty day’s driving. Every little village has at least three speed humps of varying intensities intended to slow the kamikaze traffic down. Only a very small number of them have any kind of sign or warning posted before you hit them, and going at 80km an hour they are not always easy to see and pretty nasty to hit. In these same towns, by coincidence, the  hawkers are much more determined than in other places, rushing straight out into the traffic, in front of your car, or a car on the other side of the road, apparently heedless of the risk. They have bags of tomatoes, onions and home-made slingshots. I am trying to work out whether Amanda will kill me if I buy two of these for her sons, because frankly, they are pretty cool. Maybe I should buy them and send them and if she doesn’t approve she can them it for herself (and a spare for the husband) and use it to keep stray cats from killing her wildlife in the blue mountains. Or they could shoot water bombs at each other. Whatever. If people want one, post a comment and I will take orders. Genuine African Slingshots direct.  

We are trying to get to the coast and have assumed that we will be able to find cheap hotels or camping along the way, as is usual in all the more developed African countries. We assume wrong. We turn down a $70 a night hotel because it is too expensive, and drive on for another two hours. It is dark, and we haven’t seen accommodation of any kind. 

And then we find Man Eaters. You have to drive through a creepy little ghost town and over some train tracks to get to Man Eaters. It’s appealing name comes from the number of railway workers who were killed by lions during the construction of the railway. We go to reception to be told, no camping, rooms are … I can’t bring myself to tell you the price. But it was much, much more than $70. While Paul stood and gulped for air for a few minutes I decided that we should just make the best of it. There was no question of going back on the road and risking a head on with a vehicle or an elephant for the sake of a couple of hundred dollars. If we crack the windscreen it would cost more than that to replace. I convince Paul to bite the bullet and we go to our luxury tent, lay under the air conditioning and wait for dinner to be served.

Friday 3rd September Mnarani Hotel

Paul drives like he was born to the matatu (the aggressive mini van drivers that provide most of the public transport) - assertive weaving in and out of the traffic flow without ever scraping the paint on our car. Quite a feat in Mombassa where it always feels like six lanes of traffic is trying to squeeze itself into three. We thought that once we got to the coast that finding camping would be easy. But we thought wrong. At 7pm it is raining, totally, totally dark, no streetlights, some vehicles with no lights, the windscreen is smeared with dirt and grease and  *@#$! I’ve just hit another speedbump. Thank God it wasn’t a pedestrian or a cyclist or a donkey. I feel that the luck can’t last. The very next place we see, even though it has a posh boom gate, and a long, long, winding driveway and security guards in white shirts, and a marble foyer…We can’t keep driving at night, in the rain.  I suspect that all my cursing “dammit, I can’t believe we are stuck in a posh hotel again!” seem just a little less than sincere to Paul.

Saturday 4th September - Sunday 5th September Mida Creek Campsite.

There’s no where to swim here, the campsite is set directly inside some mangroves, but we need a bit of a rest after all that driving (and all those swank hotels) so we have two days of camping and chilling out.

Monday 6th September – Thursday 9th September Seventh Day Adventist Beach Resort, also known as camping heaven.

We are discovering that campsites on the beach in Kenya are somewhere between extinct and non existent. Every available inch of beach is squatted on by resorts and hotels. We drive around all day scouting for the one camping place listed in the lonely planet and it is closed. I am feeling very disappointed that we won’t get to spend our anniversary on the beach as we planned. And then, with a little help from some friendly locals, the Seventh Day Adventist resort appears like the image of heaven I am sure it was designed to be. The ”many mansions” over look the beach, and the wide rolling lawn behind is entirely for us, the only campers.  

We spend three days here, chilling on the beach, going out for pizza and wine on our happy anniversary. Six years of fun, adventure, happiness and harmony – we can clink to that.

Friday 10th September – Mombassa Backpackers

It’s the end of Ramadan and feels like we have woken up into a totally different village. Everyone has been to the mosque this morning, and virtually all the locals are suddenly vibrantly muslim. The cylindical white hats, long smocks and hijabs are out in force. A funny contrast to the battalion of tanned Italian tourists wearing swimmers so tight they bite into the flesh.

The drive back to Mombassa is hot and tiring, and when we arrive at the shopping centre and there is a busy cafe that seems to be full of the lunch crowd, I am happy to eat and rest in a popular place before we shop.

The first strange thing is a sign in the cafe that prohibits “nudity, either obscene or loitering.” I haven’t eaten in too many places where this has been a problem persistent enough to warrant a sign. And then we notice the young African ladies sitting alone (African ladies are never on their own. Never. There is always a child or a husband or a granny hanging around. It would drive me crazy.) And the African ladies that aren’t alone are sitting with sunken and shriveled old white men. And then it starts to dawn on us…Hang on a minute…It turns out that the thing drawing all the customers to this place is not the food. After eating…No, definitely not the food.

Saturday 11th September Mombassa Backpackers

We wake up and there is a horrible, bloody hunk of hair covered skin hanging over one of our rear vision mirrors. Like a pelt from a white goat. Is someone trying to have some fun with the vegans, we wonder?

They should provide a complementary coating of spray cooking oil to people wishing to ride in a Matatus. It would make it a lot easier to get in and out. They are mini bus taxis, always crammed so tightly with people that you have to grab things to pull yourself through the sea of bodies to an available seat. I love them. They play loud music and everyone is squeezed in together and the bus rocks and jumps and weaves at a cracking pace through the dense traffic. I tell myself that I love them because otherwise it is scary.

It’s the morning after the night before: We are wandering around in Mombasa on Saturday morning, when the fasting of Ramadan only finished last night. Presumably, everyone is in bed vainly struggling to digest six plates of goat curry and rice and wake up from their food coma. Nothing is open, but it is also very peaceful, and we wander largely without fear of being run over which might be a first for the whole time we have been in Africa.

Mombassa is beautifully moldering. There is no new investment, but the tiny alleys are lined with ancient carved doors, giving the whole city an air of being dark and layered and intricate. We have passion fruit juice at one place, and then biriyani with baby okra and swahili spiced tea at another.

When we get home we are packing the groceries into the car fridge when we hear a loud “thunk.” A leg bone has just dropped out of the sky onto the bonnet of the car. There must be a slaughter yard nearby, where birds are scavenging and trying to carry off as much as they can. Or would that be trying to carry on?

At least the mystery is solved.

Sunday 12th September – Hunters Lodge, 14km from Makindu.

Another dusty transit day, but at least it ends at a grassy campsite by the side of the river. Very nice.

Monday 13th September – JJs – Home Sweet Home

So nice to be back at Jungle Junction, just around the corner from the land of plenty. And the land of good hospitals.

When we were in Malawi I wrote about my hair falling out (I think due to Doxycycline and the poor diet in Mozambique.) Some people reading the blog seemed so worried by this information that when I started suffering from leg ulcers I didn’t put it in the blog lest they collapse into a quivering pile of anxious jelly.

I have since been reassured that they want to know and now I have a good news story to provide a counterpoint to the bad one, so here it goes.

I got a leg ulcer, I think from a simple ingrown hair that became infected after swimming in lake Malawi. The leg ulcer started just like a big pus filled pimple but quickly evolved into a gaping open sore sitting on top of a large pus chamber. After about a week I was limping and in constant pain, and necrosis began to set in, the centre of the ulcer turning black as the capillaries died away. I went to the hospital in Livingstonia and received anti biotics which worked while I was taking them. As soon as I stopped, the ulcer returned. I was quite worried that the open sore would provide an oppotunity for other infections and parasites to enter my body, and it was very painful and it looked horrible. A hole in my leg filled with black and red and white and yellow that was constantly wet and seeping.

We went back to Livingstonia hospital, and I was directed into the treatment room. I sat in the treatment room watching the rats chase each other amongst the boxes while I waited for the clinician. The nurse wanted to call the clinician, but there was no electricity. She peeled the wet dressing back and it has swollen to a purple black colour. It feels like there is a jam lid pushed under the skin, so tight it is with infection. The skin is hot to the touch. The clinician arrives and puts gloves on, and in a further boost to my confidence, unwraps a kidney bowl from a sterile packet. He wants to try and manipulate the pus out of my leg and I agree to this. It is quite painful but I want the thing to heal and can see that it clearly isn’t going to be able to do that when there is such a huge amount of pus trapped inside. He massages some pus out, and the black hole in my leg gapes bigger and bigger. He then says he wants to inject a local anesthetic and scrape the dead tissue out of my leg. I am thinking about it when he shows me what he plans to use. He has a pair of blunt nosed scissors that I didn’t see come out of a packet or an autoclave or any other suitable place. They might have come out of one of the rat-drawers for all I know. I say, thanks very much, but no thanks. He and the nurse say, we can see you’re scared, white people always are, but we do this all the time and this is the best thing to do. And I kind of believe them: I think this is one of the most common diseases that local people are afflicted with in this area, and I am sure they are very good at treating them but…those scissors. I can’t do it. I thank them very much again and limp out to the car. Over the next week I try a different strategy of keeping it open to the air in the afternoons, (when I have finished the dirty jobs like feeding chooks and gardening) washing it with saline and letting it dry out. With less pus inside it seems to make an improvement for a little while, but within a fortnight it has returned to it’s former pulsating glory and I have about seven others on my legs (and one right at the very top of my leg where no ulcer should ever go) and it is time to get a third opinion from a western doctor. The doctor makes no diagnosis: could be an infection, could be maggots, not quite sure. So, we take an empirical approach and I coat half of them with vaseline (to smother potential maggots. They should die and emerge from the ooze when they can’t breathe) and start another course of anti biotics in case it is an infection. After a few days, no maggots have emerged and the anti biotics seem to be working. And this time it seems to work for good. Even now, three months later, one of them still has a slightly open top, and a small swelling beneath, but all the others have closed and healed and look like cigar burns on my legs.

I am happy to report that two days ago I had a much better experience with Nairobi hospital. I have had what seemed to be a niggling eye infection for about a month now. I self diagnosed on the internet, and tried a couple of courses of eye drops that helped while I was using them but as soon as I stopped the redness and swelling and sticky discharge recurred. So we went to Nairobi hospital, where you can see a GP twenty four hours. We were told to go in the middle of the night because it’s quieter, and we were on our way, eating (and drinking beer) at an Ethiopian restaurant when we elected to go home and continue drinking because a) we were having a good time and b) the risk of “road blocks” and car jacking gets greater as the night rolls on. So we went home and the next day I questioned the wisdom of having a night of drinking when the original plan was to go to hospital, but it turned out to be a fortuitous decision. We turned up to the hospital, which was clean and modern complete with a fancy café restaurant and convenient pharmacy in the entrance. I walked up one floor to a GP’s office and explained what I wanted. The assistant said “wouldn’t you prefer to see an optometrist?” and next thing I knew I was seeing a specialist eye surgeon. In his waiting room, like all the waiting rooms, you are invited to help yourself to complimentary tea or coffee or spring water. Such is the service for those who have the coin. Before I could finish my complimentary drink my eyes were being examined by the suit clad specialist in his fully equipped consultation room. It turns out that I don’t have an eye infection, I am just having an allergic reaction to the pollution and the dust. Hooray. It was much easier than getting to see a specialist in Australia – such is life for the Überrich in very unequal societies.    

It is very reassuring to know that Nairobi hospital is only a day’s drive (or emergency plane ride) away for the rest of the time that we are in this region of Africa. I was a bit nervous when we moved out of range of the south African hospitals. Now we have a replacement.

 

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, but the time has finally come…and if a picture is woth a thousand words then this might be the longest post yet.

 

I am testing out a theory that the number of comments left on the blog has a direct relationship with how many photos we are putting up.

Thursday 12th August – “The Lawns” Lushuto Tanzania

Lushuto is a little village up in the mountains about 200km from the Kilimanjaro range. “The Lawns” is an aptly named campsite and guest house where the camping is on the rolling greens of it’s golf course. There is a catch though; just as I initially marvelled at the rolling green hills of England, at how luminously green they are, it wasn’t long before I realised that where there is rich green lawn there is rain. Lots and lots of rain. The rain traps us at the lawns for two days but fortunately they have a ping pong table and satellite tv so when I am not thrashing Paul at ping pong (I just said that last bit to see if he reads this) I can watch SPCA rescue shows on Animal Planet. Bliss.

Saturday 14th August , Coffee Tree campsite, Kilimanjaro

Transit day: driving and driving. Dust fills my nostrils and coats my whole body. My hair feels crunchy with it. We eat a lunch of crackers, olives, tomato and black coffee parked on the road side being swooshed by trucks swaying with speed. Groups of colourfully dressed women walking to no imaginable destination (villages are spaced twenty or more kilometres apart) greet us cheerfully, “Jambo!” and we reply “SiJambo.” Passing through a signposted 30km an hour zone Paul gets shot with a speed gun. He shouldn’t have been speeding, but it is also hard for us to get used to the fact that some police forces (like Malawi) are so under resourced, while others have fancy things like speed guns. If you need a policeman for something in Malawi you have to drive to the station and pick him up. But Tanzania can affrod speed guns. We didn’t have the 20,000 Tanzanian shillings the policeman wanted (about $13US) but he agreed to let us go for the 11,000 we did have if we didn’t demand a receipt. I’ve done much hand wringing over this since and still don’t know what we will do next time. I am confident that to demand that he take us to the police station and book us properly (with the aim being that the money he takes goes into the state coffers not the coppers pocket) is to risk being heavily victimised. There seems a big risk of them handing out a lot of punitive fines for things that we might not be aware of, like obscure laws about having a reflective jacket for every passenger in the car. But maybe that isn’t true, and my imagination is part of the problem, allowing corruption to pass unchallenged. And certainly it is much easier to just pay a bit of money and be on one’s way and they know that. Perhaps we will take a more principled stand next time, stay tuned.

We arrive at Marangu, the closest village to the gate for Kilimanjaro and matching my mood to my physical condition I am feeling filthy. Tired, dirty, hungry and suddenly there are swarms of people around the car, almost pushing themselves in the windows trying to secure a contract with us to be our guide. I cannot stand it, I feel like screaming at them to leave me alone. Fourtunately, having made what seems like thousands of very polite and patient refusals over the course of this trip, I have a kind of autopilot where I can just sail convincing words out of my mouth without requiring any sincerity or thought. We have a rice/beans/greens dinner at a local restaurant and then drive to the coffee tree campsite. This is the luxury camping option, and for once it is completely worth it. An outdoor roofed kitchen area with a central fireplace, lush lawn and the best hot showers, oh, in the universe. A minor downside is the presence of twenty German scouts who have just come from a scout convention in Nairobi, and who are doing all the things that you would expect scouts to do in the night time, like having wholesome singalongs and laughing a lot. They are so full of joy that even in my grouchified state I find it hard to begrudge them their ‘hotel California’ 

Sunday 15th August Coffee Tree Campsite

I wake up very excited that we are going to go to the Kilimanjaro gate, which in my mind I am conjuring as a bustling base camp, just like the movies show the surrounds of Everest. I imagine sweeping vistas of the snow-capped mountain, equipment and provisions shops bustling with the activity of climbers and porters preparing an ascent or celebrating a succesful return. We walk half an hour from the campsite up the steep mountain road that winds amongst banana plantations and the farms of the local people who grow all sorts of things including thick tangled clumps of peas (taking Paul and I both back to childhood memories of gorging on sweet peas straight off the vine) as well as corn and cabbages and cassava. We pass though the first gate (after the second gate there is the very steep charge of $60 US per person just to enter! ) and wander amongst the fresh and bouncy looking arrivals and the jelly legged and bedraggled returns who all walk sideways in agony down the small flights of stairs. It is a bit of  let down; you cannot even stroll in the foothills without paying the massive fee.

There is no view of Kilimanjaro from here; out on the road you can glimpse her sometimes when the for a few moments the clouds are blown away. The most spectacular thing, and it is spectacular, are the loads being carried by the porters. Every porter would have a massive backpack as a standard item, and then be carrying something in his hand (a gas bottle or a large sack of cabbages, for instance) and using his other hand to occasionally steady the load that was balanced on his head, another massive sack that might contain pots and pans or more vegetables or maybe a small, lazy climber – who knows!

Monday 16th August Coffee Tree Campsite

Since Kilimanjaro national park is a no-go we instead spend the day wandering in the surrounding villages, and it is a very interesting and vibrant day. Although Kenya had a spasm of violence in 2007, up until that point Kenya was seen as one of the safe and stable countries of Africa. And it seems to me that the ordinary people are working hard to earn that reputation back. As is the story everywhere in Africa, though, the ordinary people are being sadly let down by their governement. I read that after the 2007 elections erupted in violence, 44 ministers of cabinet were eventually selected. Those ministers expenses alone consumed a staggering 7 billion dollars out of the whole country’s 11 billion dollar budget.

However, while there are still a lot of problems in Kenya, the blessing conferred by a long period of stability is apparent. In contrast to Mozambique, which had been hounded beyond exhaustion by civil war for 30 years, you can see that the people sitting by the roads are still in shock, as if from a car crash. The difference to Kenya is striking. Kenya is obviously much more prosperous; there are books for sale in the supermarkets, most people dress smartly and are obviously busy, there are lots of high-end cars on the road (presumably being driven by ministers and their families.) Even people who are getting about in not-so-sunday best, those people are busy. They smell of sweat and you can tell that they have been working, labouring in the fields or on machinery and they hold themselves up and greet us as equals when we meet them on the street. So walking in the village is very pleasant, it is very nice to walk amongst friendly, confident, talkative people and seeing everyone busy with building, gardening, parenting, working or schooling.

We’re having fun with porridge in these cold mountain places, the current favourite is apple and cinnamon porridge (chop up an apple 1cm cubes and boil in the right amount of water for porridge for about 3 mins, add porridge oats and sultanas or raisins (a good source of iron), cook 2 mins, add cinnamon, and sugar to taste.) We also rotate banana and date and banana. Full of oats we head out down the mountain and stroll along the farms and tiny houses. People greet us everywhere , happy to see us and wondering where we are going. We have lunch by the pool at another fabulously outdated swish hotel. The Kilimanjaro Mountain Resort, with it’s wide gravel drive way, waiters in cumberbunds and poolside bar would have been the thing in 1984, but it is feeling a bit dated in a groovy way now. And the food is really good, the greek salad comes with two dressings!

After lunch the path to the waterfall winds down the side of a steep valley planted with banana trees, chilli plants, sunflowers and here and there a tiny family cemetery marked out by a small row of single bed shaped piles of rocks. Little streams fan all across the foothills feeding the rich soil.  The waterfall feeds a large stream that you can wade up and down. On either side the steep walls of the valley are thickly hung with jungle plants and vines.

Near the terminus of the waterfall a tiny, elderly, bespectacled man meets us and starts chatting with us. He is so tiny, he reminds me of the crazy frog of ringtone fame. After a little bit of conversation (his name is Edward George, he is 65 ) we decide to go across to the bottom of the falls, which requires some careful navigation of the deep parts of the stream. I am not sure what happened that gave Edward the impression that Paul needed help – perhaps he seemed unsteady on his feet, perhaps he didn’t follow Edward’s instructions precisely enough. Anyway, next thing I know Edward has grabbed Paul by the arm like he was a wayward two year old in Woolworth’s making a break for the chocolate aisle. Paul looks over his shoulder at me, helplessly, as Edward calmly, but firmly, guides him to safety. I start having one of those laughing fits where the more I think about how I shouldn’t be laughing (the man probably is trying to be nice, and if I laugh too much I am definitely going to fall over) the less control over myself I have. Suppressed laughter starts leaking out of my eyes as tears. So the photo at the end of this blog is a bit of mischief – Edward very kindly offered to take our photo together, a very nice one at that, and I repaid his kindness by asking him to be in a photo with Paul, astonished at my good luck that kind Edward would spontaneously hold hands with Paul again! So now you all know how horrible I am, that I find kind and open gestures in the world and respond to them with mockery. Shame Tanya, shame.

Tuesday 17th April  Sakina Campsite, Arusha, Tanzania

Transit day, another day another dilemma. Some days Africa is great and some days it gets me down. On the transit days, that is when you see a lot of hardship, and you also get the opportunity to stare at it and think about how it is only a speck, a tiny flash of all the multitudes of hardships that we have no concept of. You see horrific animal cruelty, goats tied on the roof of buses, on the backs of bikes, skinny donkeys being beaten and starving dogs. You see tiny children,  five year old children who wouldn’t be allowed to cross the road alone on Australia, working on the roads as cattle herders, or carrying bags of charcoal bigger than they are. You see people carrying water in buckets for miles to their homes. And you see stray children. Children on their own, no where near a village, just aimlessly wandering.

We are having lunch when a skinny stray girl of about seven approaches the car warily and starts walking in circles around us, before stopping and standing at a distance just watching. I interpreted this to mean that she wanted us to give her food, and I agonised about whether to do this or not.

I have given children food before, apples and bananas and bread, and it seems to me that the result is that children see a car stopped and crowd around it, begging. Which is obviously not something I want to encourage, and particularly I do not want to make children vulnerable to predators by setting up a behaviour where they approach strangers looking for gifts.

So I didn’t feed the little girl, and then afterwards I thought, this girl is so far beyond the possibility of becoming vulnerable, she is already vulnerable to starvation. The world is sometimes a place that is far too morally compex for me, and I wish so much that it was simpler, that if a person is hungry, of course you will share your food.

On the radio the news is that a man has tried to sell another man who suffers from Albinism for his body parts (like selling a chicken, it’s alive today but it’s chopped up tomorrow ) has been caught by police in a sting.  The Kenyan selling the man anticipated receiving $250,00US for the Albino’s body. Tanzania has been rocked recently by a string of Albino murders and just in the last month four men have been sentenced to death for killing a five year old albino girl, butchering her alive.

Wednesday 18th August

Shortly after setting out on the main road connecting Arusha to Nairobi we enter a dusty wasteland. This land has been stripped of it’s trees, and without them the rainfall patterns have been disrupted and the process of desertification has set in. Incredibly, Masaai people are still driving their herds of cows and goats through here. Two Maasai women approach us when we stop to swap drivers, they are the ladies in the photograph. It is a full days driving. At 4pm we arrive at the outskirts of Nairobi (which the lonely planet reassuringly refers to as “Nairobbery” with our windows wound up and the doors locked. For the next three and a half hours we mostly sit in the cities appalling grid lock. Certainly, the biggest risk here of rolled down windows is the unfathomable pollution. Exhaust fumes and superfine dust are a tangible presence in the car that you want to grab by the scruff of the neck and toss out the window. Finally, at seven thirty, after an hour of hideously stressful night driving, driving up and down the roads where people don’t recognise rules like “headlights on after dark” and “drive on the left” (and often ignore both these rules simultaneously, appearing in your lane suddenly head on and giving you a big surprise) we finally find the driveway for Jungle Junction. And then it’s shower, headache tablet, bed.          

And so, the famous Jungle Junction, here we are.  The day after we arrived I we went to the embassy and voted, and then we went to the museum and settled in to wait for our new Carnet. We’ve seen a movie. Inception – very fun and fast moving and such a treat. But my one question is, if they know that all they need to do is dream up better weapons “Don’t be afraid to dream bigger” I think one guy says, as he pulls out a grenade launcher to toast a baddie, how come no one ever uses this power again? It would have made everything easier, and more interesting.  To my mind, for a movie about dreams it was a bit unimaginative.

Last weekend one of the guests staying in a camper van near us had a small nervous breakdown, shouting at me and our neighbours about how we were in “his garden”and how young people today have no manners. (because we are paking to close, and making funny faces at him.  He is a long term resident and basically, from coming to stay here a month ago he has gone from having the place all to himself to being surrounded by cars. We didn’t understand all his ranting and raving about “privacy” until he moved his car, had his Kenyan girlfriend around to visit for two nights in a row and then miraculously returned to his normal self.

The showers here are also strange. Someone early on in our travels was talking to me about the ingenious shower “famously invented by an Australian.” I was a bit mystified, but thought he might be talking about some kind of solar shower we had not yet seen. When I realised what he meant, for the first time in my whole life my patriotism was offended.  Actually, he meant these horrid things we nicknamed the “electro shocker” which we have never seen before because they would never be permitted in any first world country. It is like a little kettle element attached directly to the head of the shower that heats the water up right before it hits you. The showers here give you at least a little bit of comfort in that they have rubber floor mats (I always wear my flip flops as well) but while you take an electroshower the light always flickers ominously, dim and then superbright just like they do when someone is killed in the electric chair in a movie.

But mostly it’s nice here, and there is a kitchen so I’ve been able to fully enjoy the bounty that Kenya offers, strawberries and mushrooms – I even had a South African sharing our meal last night…and he ate tofu!!